Video Game / Sonic.Exe: Spirits of Hell

Sonic.Exe: Spirits of Hell and its sequel, Sally.Exe: Whisper of Soul are two game series based on Sonic.exe by Danuha2526 (aka Dan the Patient Bear). The first game was released on June 18, 2018, while the sequel is released on August 19, 2021. Then got cancelled due to demotivation on 15th of June 2022. It is set in the Shared Universe with Sonic.exe: Nightmare Beginning.

Remakes for the first game, with the second along with the DLC (the first being Spirits of Hell: RECODED by GoldCodeX (led by KoolTimYT) Sally.exe: Whisper Of Soul Remake by Withered Salvage Aleks and The Prophecy Remake by MoonyEclipsy) are in the works to revamp and/or complete the experience for newer fans to the games.

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These games contain examples of:

• Arc Words: "For atrocities, a Villain is needed. For a Villain a Hero is needed. But if there is no Villain, there is no Hero either." -The words that appear when you start the story of Whisper Of Soul.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: In the Whisper Of Soul's Final boss, despite showing that the whole cast came to fight back against Exeller, you can only pick one character to show up on screen at the time by switching between them. In Spirits Of Hell's Knuckles and Tails duo, you can switch between two characters, and only one can appear on screen at the time.
  • Switch-Out Move: You will have to switch between characters because of the trope above: while you are holding the switch button, the time conveniently stops around you. There is no cooldown to this, and you can hold it as long as you want, which can lead to an easy exploit that you can use to cheese the Final Boss himself.
• All for Nothing: Both games that don't end with the Best Ending. Doesn't end well for the heroes, in Spirits Of Hell, they get killed off screen, and in the Whisper Of Soul, if you beat Solo Sally's boss, all you get is a kick in the face by Exeller, as you watch Sally fly down from the building to presumably plummet to her death. Others just suicide, or face worse fates than death, but it all ends with the timeline getting reset, the only reason you are doing this is to get the Best Ending, that is locked behind an requirement of getting all 20 endings.
• Acceptable Breaks from Reality:
  • Soft Glass: In the Cream Solo, Cream dashes through an window, breaking it with her speed and weight, she gets no major injuries or embeded glass stuck inside her, same thing happens to Tails in the Tails and Sally Route, but he gets thrown through the window by Knuckles, and finally in the Best Ending, Tails Doll with Cream get launched through the window, while desperately trying to escape Exebark, nothing happens to them again.
  • In the Crazy Amy Route: At the end of the chase, Cream claims to have hurt her leg from falling really high, then after she deals with Amy, she proceeds to walk it off, by walking away with Eggman.
• Almost Dead Guy: In the Amy and Cream route. Amy will find a prison guard who tries to play dead. His guts are outside his body, and as he holds them back up with his hand, he seems to have lost the ability to talk and can only communicate with silent nods and shakes of his head. He reveals all he can with this moment, until Exebark comes and finishes him off by biting into him deep.
• Anyone Can Die: And it's true—everyone out of the main cast will in fact die. And if there are any characters left, you will control them instead.
• All There in the Manual: In Spirits of Hell, after beating the first level as Sonic and seeing its cutscene, the game will state that you should try to save them all, and depending on who makes it to the end, it all depends on you. Averted, as they get Killed Offscreen if you don't get the Best Ending. Despite this, the game could have just left this detail out for a "Ray of Hope" Ending. Then in Character Select, there will be a help button, which will show all the different colored rings to the player, their purpose, and what they all do.
  • In Whisper of Soul, normally before a boss battle starts or some new level that will introduce you to new mechanics, or just a character who you are playing as for the first time, a tutorial will appear to show what they are all capable of doing or just how exactly it all works. They are also unskippable so...you will be forced to watch them every single time you replay them.
• All Deaths Final: If you fail to save a character, they will stay dead for the whole duration of the round.
• Art Shift:
  • In the Spirits Of Hell: Sonic starts in the sprite style of Modgen, but when he gets Possessed by Exeller. His sprite style changes to Sonic 3.
  • In the Whisper Of Soul: The character's design gets fully changed to Modgen; Tails in particular, instead of only having yellow colors, now has orange and yellow mixed up with him. (In his sprite sheet, it is labeled as an alternative color palette.) And Knuckles and Eggman have also got their respective Modgen designs. Amy gets a Justified Modgen design due to her aging up using Sally's machine. But in the first screen of Spirits Of Hell and its Best Ending credits cutscene, it shows her younger than Whisper Of Soul shows. Also, Execun and Exebark looked different than what we got in the full game.
• Adaptational Heroism: In Sonic R, Tails Doll is one of the antagonists that serves Eggman to assist him in his global domination. In this game, he serves as a valuable ally to Cream and and her friends. Except until things go wrong, and someone out of the main cast dies, he will do a Heel–Face Turn and decide to attack Cream due to the curse he is placed under by Execun.
• Adaptational Jerkass: Rotor, who goes from easy going and bashful to a downright unreasonable and antagonistic Freedom Fighter (once Execun-Sally rules Freedom City) who has no qualms gunning down two minors and at one point, even threatening to kill Cream in her Solo run. It takes Tails being alive to recognize him, and even then, he is only convinced when Tails cuts his hand as proof of being a living being.
• Animated Music Video: Ready as I'll ever be.
• And Show It to You: In one of Amy's death scenes, Exeller tears her heart out and shows it to her right before shoving it into her head. There is also Knuckles's death scene, where if you make the wrong choice, he will get his heart ripped out of by Exeller, then he shows it on display as he crushes it underneath his fingers.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Checkpoint: In both games, some levels have this feature, in case you failed a long level, and the game clearly understands that.
  • In Sally.exe Whisper of Soul.
    • The game has an integrated Level Select right from the start, so the player can access levels they've simply reached or played before, which can save a lot of time trying to catch up to where you were from a fresh playthrough. This can be considered invaluable with the Best Ending's final challenges.
    • Should you lose all of your lives during the true ending route for Freedom City Zone, rather than a worst ending scene (and subsequently forcing you to replay the whole route for another try at the true ending), Alice will instead reset to the point where you've started while encouraging players to succeed next time. However, there is a limit; as she tells you before the war section starts, she can only reset the timeline a few times. Should you lose for the fourth, it's Game Over.
    • During the final boss fight with Exeller, you have unlimited lives during the battle, enabling you to fight him again as many times as you want.
• Artistic License – Physics: Despite being a stuffed toy without an endoskeleton (his only robotic part being his head, which serves as his power core), Tails Doll is capable of moving his limbs and lifting things and people (like rockets and Cream and Tails).
• Ax-Crazy:
  • if you choose to view Amy's past in Whisper of Soul, she will become hellbent on revenge of killing Robotnik after that point, even killing Knuckles and Tails for not cooperating with her, who are her friends, and that she is burning all possible bridges in order to corner Robotnik. And in the end, becoming a boss fight in her own Route. In some cases, Exeller will simply kill Amy outright since she's no longer useful for him (i.e. Robotnik has already died before she views her past).
  • Exeller is this. Justified as he is a Zero-class Highest, a class that are noted to be inherently psychotic, which only boiled over after his and Laura's death. It also is a downplayed case: because of some Laser-Guided Amnesia, he was mentally stable for a while, his teacher even stating Exeller has a perfect attitude. He only shows his psychotic side after Laura's death, and even then, he still is shown to deeply care about Alice, as seen in the Crazy Amy ending if Tails tells Cream that Robotnik killed Amy's parents on purpose.
  • His lackey Execun even more so, as unlike him, he fully embraces his psychotic behavior and takes pleasure in killing others in brutal ways.
• Advancing Wall of Doom:
  • Eggman in the Sprits Of Hell: During the "..." level, when you pass up to an difficulty of Medium, Advancing Wall Of Doom will appear behind Eggman's tail, and if you won't hurry up and let it touch you, is an instant kill.
  • In the Cream's Solo Route of Whisper Of Soul, during a level "Danger Spectre" you will pass an trigger that activates rain, and an Advancing Wall Of Doom with it.
• Ambiguous Situation: In the VS Metal Sonic game over sequence: The group will find Cream's corpse, whenever who actually killed Cream (Amy due to her psychotic state, or Metal Sonic) is not revealed. As Amy has hallucinations before the fight even starts. Amy is then seen insane, and standing on the ledge, wanting to jump off.
• Action-Based Mission: Once the Main Cast will stop hiding under their skirts in the first part. Then they normally start to retaliate back in the second part.
• Book Ends: In the Spirits Of Hell's Best Ending: It will show young Amy and Cream, looking for Cheese in the forest, then when you boot up the sequel, Amy looks different and much older, and that cutscene from Spirits Of Hell doesn't happen at all.
• Blah, Blah, Blah: When Exeller is being questioned by Amy on who he is, he replies back with:
  Exeller: "Fine... I'm a highest, guardian of the universe, blah-blah, we protect you mortals from evil and stuff"

• Badass Crew: Round 1 with Round 2 Cast combined is:
  • Miles "Tails" Prower: A genius fox that is backed up with his genius, that even Sally received help from.
  • Knuckles The Echidna: A solo guardian of the Master Emerald that will guard it with his pure strength with his boxing spiked-gloves, that Exeller desperately wants to take control of. Sally also calls him a treasure hunter, which helps in the Best Ending when he is being tasked to locate the generators, although he has his Chronic Hero Syndrome, which means that he will sacrifice his own life in order to save other people that are dear to him.
  • Doctor Ivo Robotnik/Eggman: A villainous genius that can be compared with Miles's, he carries a gun for self-defense, and he also has his jetpack with him for an escape plan, but he is not that evil in the routes, as when paired with Cream, he will claim that he will not abandon a child, but he will also not a babysitter in the first place, he is also the very reason that some naive girl has lost her very dear parents...
  • Amy Rose: A naive girl, that is not so defenseless with her piko-piko hammer, she is also fearless in her Solo route as she falls down on the incoming flying badniks that she hitches a ride on. She is also aged up by using Sally's machine, which made their relationship with each other end on a bitter tone, and you also don't want to know the wrath of a mad girl that has found out who killed her parents...
  • Cream The Rabbit: A six year old girl, who really does not fit the criteria of a badass. She is polite and kind, and is usually backed up with her Chao friend pet Cheese, which she loses at the start of the sequel. If she is pushed to a curtain negative point, she can lash out at people via the use of a Chaos Emerald, or a Fire Ring, anger or hatred fuel as you may say. By the Best Ending, she will have to face the toughest boss she has never ever faced before... and the only determination that will push her through this, is you.
  • Sally Acorn: A queen of Mobius that wields an family heirloom gadget that can make a sword physically appear in her hands with other coloured elements to boot, and she can even back kick the Big Bad in the face. When being interrogated by a highest in the glasses for asking the Queen of Highests for help, she responds that she is doing that to "Save her friends". (which may also be a white lie, as when she spots them one of them, she will point her sword at them in case of their attack, which is justified since she just saw her royal servant Antoine being killed and replaced by Execun. But in the Sally and Cream route, if Cream will try to bring her friends up in hopes of her not killing her, she will turn her into barbeque, but if she brings her family instead, she will be spared, and protected from Amy.exe) She is also a very "people" person, as at the start of almost every route, she will mention the word "People."
• Battle in the Center of the Mind: Whisper Of Soul's Finale Boss.
• Battle in the Rain: VS Alice boss fight, where both Exeller and Alice fight during the rainy weather.
• Back-to-Back Badasses: Duo endings or Trio endings. As they gather the power in numbers. Except that Sadistic Choice in the Whisper Of Soul.
• Berserk Button: Amy, if she finds out that Eggman killed her parents. She will spend the rest of the cycle hunting him down in a psychotic rage, and anybody getting in her way will probably not survive.
• Bittersweet Ending: Some of them do happen in the end at the Round 1. But it then gets averted that all non-best endings will get those who lived till the end killed off anyways. Off-Screen. Which then serves as a pointless feat to do, as it destroys all the purpose to even do them in the first place. What's the point if the reward is just them getting killed off, off-screen? But then the Round 2 reconstructs it, as some endings are in fact Bittersweet, some even live to the end, and actually manage to escape the chaos that is Freedom City. It still gets the timeline to reset, but at least some of them did in fact lived until the end.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: During Round 1, Exeller invokes this trope by directly taunting the player with their failures and staring right at you through the screen. In Round 2, he keeps it to an moderation, but then triggers it a lot again in the DLC, such as talking directly to the player in his tutorial section.
• Bungled Suicide: In some Cream starting routes, Cream will begin with the attempt of a suicide by jumping onto spikes. She of course will always be interrupted no matter what. Knuckles mostly comes to save the day... he tries his best at least.
  • Interrupted Suicide: Our brave and heroic Knuckles mostly comes to save the day... he tries his best at least.
• Blood from Every Orifice: Exeller as every .exe follows this same trope of his eyes having blood pouring out of it. In one ending Exeller even tries to wipe it off with his hand, just for it to flow back on his sockets.
• Bond One-Liner: "Good riddance!" A line repeated by some of the characters.
• Bottomless Pits: And both games really love this trope, fair or unfair. There will be levels that feature them extensively and the penalty is losing a life.
• Big Bad: Exeller. The main Villain of the Spirits Of Hell and Whisper Of Soul games, and its DLC. As an aside, you play as him in the DLC.
  • The Unfettered: Will do whatever necesary, even if it's un-moral.
  • The Kingslayer: Before the events of the game, Exeller assasinates the King.
  • From Nobody to Nightmare: What Exeller claims he have become in the Alternative Crazy Amy ending. Saying that Alice didn't care about him at all when she found out who he was.
  • For the Evulz: Subverted, he actully does it all, to not go insane and BERZERK, but he hides it well in the Spirits of Hell, but then gets the weakness go loose in the Whisper Of Soul and the DLC.
  • Hope Crusher: That's one thing he will do in your vulnerable state.
  • It Amused Me: Might be the only reason, he keeps running his gauntlet of games by killing his victims over and over.
  • Invincible Villain: He's immortal.
  • Neck Lift: He seems to keen on lifting people by it's necks, sometimes he will be lazy enough to do that, and will just choke them and lift them up by force.
  • Screw Destiny: And he screws the destiny and it's prophecy real hard.
  • Smug Snake: Also part of Exeller's personality, acting all cocky like, with a smug mug.
  • You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Angry!: And you really don't, as DLC shows that if he gains enough INSANITY, he goes mad and destroys Mobius in a wild rage.
• Back from the Dead: Metal Sonic, previously thought to be destroyed by Exeller from Spirits of Hell, makes an appearance in Knuckles and Amy's duo ending and the True Ending route, where Amy personally fights it.
• Being Evil Sucks: Exeller notes during the worst ending in Whisper of Soul that despite his obvious glee while on a murderous rampage, his inborn psychosis and mastery of time magic means that he has no actual freedom. He can't resist his urge to kill or to use his powers, both making it so that he's trapped killing the same six people forever (along with whoever else gets in the way). Even when he succeeds in his goal of attaining ultimate power and his revenge in a given loop, he'll eventually reset the timeline anew out of sheer boredom.
  • Hypocrite Has a Point: And yet he stil acts like he is not that bad, because you are forced to gain all endings, he will keep justifyng it by saying things like "Is easy to judge when you don't know the facts" meanwhile the whole thing you do in the game, is hunting down all endings to achieve the Golden Ending one, while he keeps killing others, over and over again.
• Blue Screen Of Death: Appears when you start Whisper Of Soul, after a curtain amount of time, with a loud BEEEEEEEEP. Every. Single. Time. If you try to skip it, the game will just skip to the beeping sound straight away, expect of just skipping it out right. You are stil forced to hear it.
  ''See the video attached.

  I don't see on the digital screen of what I am pressing. I need a loud and abnoxious BEEP to let me know!

  My whole LIFE! BEEP BEEP. BEEP BEEP!

  And then, when the timer is done, what does it do? *Glitched Beeping sounds*
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • In Night Forest. The Forrester shows up to save Amy from being killed by Exeller, enabling her to escape his grasp.
    • Video Game Cruelty Punishment: But if you break the Forester's gate, he won't be able to appear to save you from Exeller, as Amy gets Insta-Killed, with no continue screen whatsoever.
  • Tails Doll first shows up to rescue Cream from Execun (either from escaping from Exebark, or from Execun disguised as Vanilla).
  • If Cream left Tails Doll, Amy or Tails will show up to thwart him from killing her upon confronting her in Volcano ruins. If Amy and Tails are already dead, Corrupted Amy will save her by destroying Tails Doll... but plans on killing her later on.
  • Alice will save one of the female protagonists from being killed by Exeller's slaves if one of the three have been killed. And in Eggman's solo ending, Alice saves him from a pursuing Exeller and teleports him near the Master Emerald.
  • If Robotnik's alive in Amy's solo ending. He recovers just in time to shoot down Exeller while the latter has her immobilized. Subverted, as Exeller's immortal and not only is he unfazed from being shot, he (inadvertently) kills Amy in his attempt.
  • In an alternate version of Amy and Cream duo run. Exeller of all people actually saves Cream from being killed by a fully corrupted Tails Doll by decapitating him, but for a different reason (he needs the Chaos Emerald, and Tails Doll is not subservient to Exeller at all in spite of his cursed state).
• Bonding over Missing Parents: Amy and Sally seems to relate to this trope a lot, as Sally has her Mother missing, and Father dead. And Amy's parents got killed by Eggman. They do come to some terms in the Best Ending cutscene. And make up the bad words they said to each other. You know what? Make it three, as Cream now doesn't have Vanilla anymore. Father died in the war, due to her false judgement, and Vanilla got killed in the cross fire, because she was part of a stupid prophecy.
• Bath Suicide: Averted, but Implied, in the Amy related memory fragment, she is in the bathroom, where she starts saying things like. "Don't be scared... Don't be scared... Its gonna be over soon..." Then Cream enters the bathroom, and notices her cutted wrists, also REINFORCING the trope of Self-Harm into the main picture.
• Boss Remix: While the original instrumental of "Endless" is used in the DLC to accompany the Majin Forest, it gets a complete remix to accompany the big boss battle against Majin Sonic himself.
• Break the Cutie: Tails and Cream's experiences during both games cause this to varying degrees. Exeller takes a particular delight in breaking Tails' mind, and Tails goes insane in a number of endings. Cream's routes are long lines of trauma, no matter which way her story is played.
• Bludgeoned to Death: There is one scene where Tails gets repeatedly smashed with a Hammer 20 times in a row by Cream. Tails was being held by Amy during that, so Cream does her job for her.
• Bullfight Boss: VS Amy in the Whisper Of Soul, she will keep charging the Player by slamming her hammer on the ground, every chance she gets.
• Butt-Monkey: In Sally.exe Whisper of Soul. Knuckles is the character that gets killed the most in any other endings (other than the true ending). He gets turned into a fried Echidna by Exeller in his duo run with Cream, gets killed by Metal Sonic during his duo run with Amy, and gets turned into a Chaos Emerald by Chaos Hunter in his solo run.
• Cosmetic Award: Beating the Whisper Of Soul's Best Ending, gets you a giant golden star, which doesn't do anything rather than to show that you have finished the game fully.
• Can't Take Criticism: When Exeller gets faced by Rexer for his The Kingslayer behaviour, he parries it by saying that he "Doesn't know the facts." and insults him by saying that he would "Screw them both." Alice and Rexer with their puny accusations. As Rexer changes his gears to the fifth one, he then charges at Exeller, but then he gets swiftly killed by him. Then Alice herself does this to Exeller, he once again doesn't take it pretty well, as he impales her with extreme prejudice.

  • Cheese Strategy: If you are still interested. If, while holding a switch, you keep switching to Amy, attack, and then switch back to other characters and back to her again, you can essentially attack infinitely in the Za Warudo fashion. Get closer to Exeller and repeat the producure until he dies, literally dominating God himself.

• And Now for Someone Completely Different: Reinforced, you will keep switching between characters repeatedly, whether they die or not, in Rounds 1 and 2.
• Cruelty Is the Only Option: In order for Cream to survive much longer in other routes: She will be forced to abandon Tails Doll, if she doesn't, Tails Doll will be taken over by the virus and will kill Cream when they both will try to cross through Metropolis Zone.
• Cutting Off the Branches: Whisper Of Soul starts out from the Spirits Of Hell's Best Ending, while Spirits Of Hell can lampshade this even earlier if you manage to ruin the best ending, Exeller will come out to inform the player that every other ending than the Best one, will just end with the survived group being Killed Offscreen, as even the endings lampshades this if you obtain any other ending than the Best One, it will show the result screen of "And who survieved this nightmare...." then it cuts to static, and back to the result screen that displays everyone demonized, with the answer "No one."
• Coup de Grâce Cutscene: Downplayed, only VS Alice seems to have one, while other boss fights show the end results, and not you landing that last hit. As the screen turns black after landing it, and goes into a cutscene.
• Continue Countdown: If you fail a segment, you can retry it if you have any lifes left, while a Continue Countdown is going down, if you let it reach zero, you are essentially giving up the character.
• Catch Your Death of Cold: After Cream beats her Volcano Valley level, she will say that she is freezing. Amy and Cream duo, actully foreshadows this outcome, as both Cream and Amy can be shoot down when crossing the river, and into the cold water, as they both can freeze to death.
• Combat Tentacles: Ultimate Execun pulls this trope once he loses against Cream, he tries to blow himself up along with Cream by restraining her with his Tentacles....
• Creator Cameo:
  • In Spirits Of Hell: Danuha (or Dan the patient bear.) can be found in the Knuckles and Eggman route, he will also comment on what difficulty you picked.
  • In Whisper Of Soul: Danuha can be found only in it's demo, (As it's still in the full game, but goes unused.) when you interact with the Forester's Gate, he will appear on a platform, who will give you a hint on where he keeps his spare keys, Amy also asks his name, who will respond with a "Just call me Dan."
• Color-Coded Elements: Sally's Elements in the right order.
  • Boost Element (Blue.)
  • Fire Element (Red)
  • Electricity Element (Yellow)
  • Wind Element (White)
  • Rock Element (Brown)
• Convection, Schmonvection: Lava Valley.
• Collision Damage: Touching an enemy without being in the roll state, deals damage to the Character.
• Cruel Twist Ending: Tails and Cream ending.
• Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are: "Come out Tails, don't make me come find you." Said by Exeller.
• Conflict Ball: Sally, each time she meets up with part of the cast, she acts wary and somewhat hostile with her pointing her sword into their direction, all due to the Antoine accident, until she gets proven that they are not demonized people, in the Best Ending she literally threatens to fight Amy and even brings up her dead parents when Amy says that her bringing up an army would be as easy as looking into the eyes of a dead person. She does stop being a jerk after Amy promises to help Sally with her searches of her mother.
• Cut Short: The planned DLC and the planned round 3 in total, get no resolution as the series was cancelled. The cancelled DLC even has an unfinished windmill level cutscene, where it literally gets CUT short, by scenery vanishing away, as Exeller runs into the void. Forever.
• Cutting the Knot: Happens early in the Whisper Of Soul: Forester's gate happens to stand in the Amy's way, it needs a Forester's key that can be found hidden in the trees. But instead of looking for the hidden Forester's key, Amy suggests to just break it open, but then she denies this idea herself, thinking that is a bad idea, and is not her way to break things to get what she wants, however, it doesn't stop the Player from making that choice. Then happens a Video Game Cruelty Punishment moment if you do break the gate, and figured out that Sonic is Exeller? Well good job, Forester is not gonna save you now when you try to get away from him.
• Completion Meter: In Whisper Of Soul: The game will track how many Multiple Endings you got in the Main Menu, in it's Story page, it will also track what levels you found in the Level Select, those that are missing will have an red question mark, but the game won't reveal you how many endings you have left to find in it's Story page. Expect if you try to go for the Best Ending straight away without getting all of the other endings, Exeller will appear as a roadblock and will deny your Best Ending, this is where he reveals how many endings you need to get to unlock it. 20 of them. Carnage Day ending doesn't count.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Forester. He doesn't actully show up if you don't break his gate, but Amy will mention about him when she wants to cross the gate. Then if you try to run away from Exeller, he will come to the rescue. (If you didn't break his gate.)
• Chess with Death: In the Best Ending. Exeller will publicly announce his presence, and state that he will assault freedom city in curtain amount of time. It means WAR. And the whole Best Ending is essentially playing Chess with Exeller, he is sending clones of his servants to destroy generators? Sally takes care of that. Curtain generators need to be powered? Knuckles the treasure hunter is on the job. One generator has to be fixed? Tails will go after it. And so on.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: Sally's mother disappears prior to game's events, she is mostly mentioned, and Exeller mocks Sally about it thinking that "He has her soul in his storage." some minor characters also appear in the story or other routes, and they may never be mentioned or seen again in the other. Like for example, the Best Ending, you will not see Bunnie, Rotor, Forester, (If he is Dead then is Justified) Antoine who is already dead, (And which Sally forgets about, and doesn't mention his fate to the others.) Cream's pet Cheese, (Which is the reason Cream came into the forest with Amy in the first place.) can even not find out about what happened to him, and will instead forget about him, and focus on her survival.
• Controllable Helplessness: During the Whisper of Soul's Trio route. If you let Tails die and you have no lifes left, Exeller instead of blowing up the train, will instead throw Sally into an unwinnable level where the walls are starting to close in on her, and all you can do is to wait until they come down on Sally and crush her. This level is an Shout-Out to the original Sally.exe
• Cutscene Power to the Max: Tails in his Solo Route. Literally beheads Exeller with his Tails's. (A move that he can't do in the gameplay) He later tries to do the same thing in Whisper Of Soul, but it fails because Exeller was immortal all along. And it was just a clone he fought.
• Curiosity Killed the Cast: Also counts as an Epic Fail. If Amy will attempt to look at her past. She will found out that Eggman's fault was behind her parent's death, and it will put her into Hell-Bented state to kill Robotnik at all costs, depending on the status of the Round 1, she will either come to kill them all, or get killed off by Exeller in the void, somehow... And if you were on your best ending route, and all of the characters are stil alive at the end of the second part. Amy won't appear to save Cream's life in time, as she will die to exebark, she will appear in the round 1 trio's group, and kill them all one by one, as Exeller then comes and kills her off as she is done. Leaving Sally as the only last survivor to play as in the third part! Have fun sucker!
• Cut the Safety Rope: The most notable one in the Whisper of Soul is the Amy and Sally route, which after getting on top of the radio tower where the Master Emerald is, they both get launched off the roof along with the master emerald, in the free fall Amy orders Sally to save the Master Emerald, as she possibily can't save them both, she assures Sally that she will fine, Sally then complies, stops the Master Emerald from shattering into tiny little pieces, then she looks around for Amy, and finds her plummeted to her death, she then breaks down crying, but it also could be IMPLIED that she wanted to go out this way. because of the other scenes that show her many attempts falling off great heights to end it all.
• Cut Scene Incompetence: Outside of gameplay, characters in one moment are kicking ass, and in another, are forcefully getting killed in the cutscenes, those normally happen if you let someone die or made the wrong choice earlier, and it comes back to bite you for that. Rendering possibile Ending combinations impossible to achieve.
• Cutscene Power to the Max: All of the crazy stuff that Exeller does normally happens in a cutscene. While in the VS Alice fight. He won't be able to do any of it. Justified as he is weakened by the proximity of the Master Emerald... [[spoiler: when being literally next to Master Emerald, in some endings, he will still be immortal after being shot by Eggman with his gun, or outright freeze characters. While in the Best Ending, he outright says that the proximity of the Master Emerald can't get him here (an Ass Pull which contradicts what he still does in the other endings.) So he gets away with freezing them all, and he takes the Chaos Emerald. And also, he can still teleport around them on the spot.
• Continuing is Painful: In the Whisper Of Soul. If you waste all of your lifes during the Best Ending. Alice will appear and will restart it from where you were last time, the issue is, she will give you only the standard amount of lifes you get at the start, 5 lifes to be exactly, and no extra lifes you got from the life monitors either. She can only do this three times. And on the fourth one, will grant you an Worst Ending again. But then gets downplayed as you have Level Select, but the kicker is, each time you need to retry any level, you would have to sit through an unskippable Blue Screen Of Death sequence, wait until the main menu appears, click on level select, then scroll down until you find the part you are stuck on, as like a punishment, oh! And the Best Ending is literally at the bottom of the Level Select. So keep scrolling for one good minute. Did I forget about the unskipable QTE? In the Best Ending? If you lose a Character, the game will give you one life as a Consolation Prize.
• Cutscene: Tails and Amy route: The game will just put you through cutscenes, with no gameplay what so ever, that ends in their suicide.
• Cycle of Revenge: "Violence breeds Violence." said by Disguised Exeller.
• Cliffhanger: Round 2's Best Ending.
• Can't Catch Up: Pretty hard to assign of who exactly is not catching up, if picking out the Round 1 characters, then it would be Knuckles, as he barely can hold his own in the Round 2, and if picking out the Round 2, then it would be Cream, as she is a literal 6 year old child, but then the Ultimate Execun boss fight, proves it wrong.
• Call-Back: A fairly small one, but the music heard in Tails's variant of Volcano Valley is the same remix that was heard during the original ''Tails' Nightmare'' Flash game, which also depicted Tails wandering through a ruined environment to survive.
  • Exeller in the Whisper Of Soul's Finale Battle. Will mention about an universe, where Tails became the villain. And that he and him were not so different. He was referencing to the Fan Made comic "Where Was My Hero." Which due to poor events that happen to Tails, make him turn rogue.
    • He also does a Shut Up, Hannibal! speech in return, disproving Exeller's words that he and him are not so different, and that he will never become a villain like him.
• Decoy Protagonist: The games don't establish who is the True Main Protagonist, they are all decoys in a sense. As anyone can die, and the game will try to continue without them.
• Determined Defeatist: If things don't go well with the Main Cast, some of them will keep going, despite all odds stacking against them.
• Dirty Coward: Amy although Justified via In-universe fear, during the Amy and Knuckles, Metal Sonic suddenly appears to confront them both, as Amy sees it, she sprints away from it due to fear of it, leaving Knuckles alone with it, once she realizes what she has done, she thinks of returning back to Knuckles to at least assist him, but is too late, as she turns around to see Knuckles's decapitated head in Metal Sonic's hand. It puts her into a panic state more, as she takes an easy way out by jumping off an high place.
• Drunk with Power: In the Whisper of Soul's Worst Ending. Exeller will say that the reset of the timeline is not required, as he has the power of souls. To this Alice will ask about what happened to him? Exeller in response will say something along the lines of that "What happened is that I only got stronger, as I will show you" prompting an fight with her.
• Dysfunction Junction:
  • Miles "Tails" Prower: At the start of the Spirits Of Hell, he seems stable. In the Sequel however, he becomes more of a Death Seeker.
  • Amy Rose: Due to the trauma sustained at young age, and her fear of Metal Sonic, she takes medication and is even seen doing Self-Harm to herself in one of the Memory Fragments. If she finds out the main cause of that trauma, is not gonna end pretty.
  • Cream: Lost her Father infront of her eyes at a young age, possibily traumatizing her in the process, it doesn't help that she is subjected to many forks in the roads, and losses, many losses.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Played with Exeller, as it's all his clones, rather than the real deal.
• Dwindling Party: Depends on how successful you are in protecting them.
• Destination Defenestration: In the Tails and Sally route: Tails gets thrown through a window by Knuckles.Exe
• Disintegrator Ray: Appears ONCE in the Cream's rooftop level, colliding with it is an instant kill.
• Darkest Hour: Hope levels.
• Despair Speech: Many of those happen in Whisper Of Soul. One that stands out the most is Amy and Tails route, if you know the context of it.
• Death Throws: If you get hit with no rings, you will fly up and fall off-screen afterwards.
• Demonic Possession: Happens to Sonic early in the game.
• Death of a Child: The game is not squimish, as it's allowing younger characters like Cream to die on screen.
• Deathly Dies Irae: Song themes from Corpse Party seems to accompany death or bad choices the characters make, which is ironic, because Corpse Party is the same thing.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: The Whisper of Soul has all sorts of Ambush events, but one sticks out of all the rest, instead of other demonized characters appearing to kill Eggman. Exeller personally comes out of nowhere, and in one good swoop kills him.
• Death as Game Mechanic: Death itself is punishable, it will mostly cost you a life in good case, or a character in a bad case if you ran out of them, or just gave them up. Losing a character will affect the story.
• Death Seeker: We have 3 out of 6 Main Characters, who are such like its own squad of suicide squaders. They will look for death in the most hopeless situations, meanwhile the other 3 despite all odds, are actively trying to fight for their life, no matter what. How exactly can you trust those people? When it all goes south they take the easy way out?
• Dark and Troubled Past:
  • Amy's parents were apparently killed by Robotnik. (In the unused dialogue, it gets revealed that they got killed either accidently to a Robbery Got Wrong, or they got killed on purpose when Eggman found out that they are not gonna come quietely.) This scarred her for life, leaving her with lingering psychological issues with Metal Sonic, and a dependence on psychiatric medication to stay stable.
    • Accidental Murder: Tails in the Crazy Amy route : can try to vouch for Eggman's actions when Cream asks for Amy's past. He can respond that it was an accident, and that his intention wasn't to kill them, as when he looks at Amy, he can't feel anything but shame for what he has done to her. Or throw Eggman under the bus by saying that he did it out of selflishness and greed.
  • Cream's father was a Freedom Fighter at one point, and died because an attempt of Cream's to help them fight off a robot attack had Gone Horribly Wrong.
• Dueling Player Characters: In some circumstances, other characters are forced to fight against each other.
• Death by Adaptation: King Acorn has died before the events of the first game. Along with Uncle Chuck, who was Sonic's Uncle.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • In Spirits Of Hell's cutscene: In the Hide and Seek act 2, you can jump while in a cutscene, which will get your cover blown and Tails killed.
  • The conversation between Robotnik (aka Eggman) and Tails when they meet at the Hidden Palace will have slight differences when the latter asks the former about Knuckles' whereabouts.
  • The solo ending cutscenes for Amy and Cream will be slightly altered depending on if Robotnik is alive or not.
    • In Cream's ending route, she'll stumble upon a still unconscious Robotnik, and Exeller proceeds to brutally kill him by stomping his head so hard that it's reduced to a paste.
    • Amy's ending route is the same as Cream's, but Exeller will not immediately kill Robotnik, enabling the latter enough time to recover to directly shoot him, only to fail (and kill Amy in the process) due to Exeller being immortal and can only be killed by another Highest.
  • In the DLC, if you kill a badnik before Exeller will have the chance to explain what his laser does, he will skip his speech entirely.
  • It gets Averted. If during the second part, you pick Cream and everyone is stil alive, Tails Doll will be able to fly with her through Volcano Valley, until they get into a chase with Exebark which gets cut off, then if you kill Sally, and then let the rest to live, Cream will be launched into a whole different cutscene, where instead of dying to the Exebark, she will die to a Tails Doll, in a complete different location, which will make no sense, rendering this as Developer's Oversight.
• Disaster Dominoes: In the Whisper Of Soul. Each character, is essentially is own Disaster Domino, if one of them falls, the rest will be soon hunted for, or if one of them sees their past, it will get spiraled out of control, as they will kill to hunt down the other, at all costs.
• Dying Dream: In the Knuckles and Amy route, she will jump off the building to avoid getting killed by Metal Sonic, after that an dream like sequence starts, where other characters will say different things to her, apologizing for her parents, or out right revealing that she died. It also ends abruptly as it started, by touching a multilated version of herself.
• Decapitation Presentation: At the end of Knuckles and Amy route: Metal Sonic will behead Knuckles and will demonstrate his decapitated head to Amy, putting her into an more unstable state.
• Driven to Suicide: A common occurrence in the second game, due to the quickly-mounting hopelessness and trauma that occurs over the two in-universe days that both games take place in, that only gets steadily worse with each new time loop.
  • Sally and Tails duo's ending has Tails ask Sally to hand him her bracelet under the pretense that he'll be modifying it to be stronger. When she does, Tails kills her and then himself in the hopes that it'll reset the timeline.
  • Amy and Tails duo ending. Tails is in an apartment recovering and Amy pays him a visit to ask his condition. When Tails informs Amy about the dèjá vu phenomenon, they both agree that they'll commit suicide via a Suicide by Pills. They do this so that in the next timeline they will succeed.
    • Suicide Is Painless: When Amy asks on how long does it take, Tails breaks down crying saying that he doesn't know for curtain, but tells her not to worry as it's a painless death, and that he better lay down to sleep...
  • Knuckles and Amy's duo ending. Amy jumps off the edge rather than allow Metal Sonic to kill her (also doubles as Better to Die than Be Killed). Amy also does the same if she loses to Metal Sonic, and despite Sally's pleas to respect Cream's final wish to live on for her, Amy jumps off anyway as her mind is too gone off to even listen.
  • Cream does this in her solo run if you choose to give up on helping everyone in Freedom City, jumping into a pit of spikes shortly after leaving the city.
  • If you don't have any remaining lives when you lose to Ultimate Execun (or lose the QTE), Cream will be sent to Suicide Hill where her friends (and Robotnik) will commit suicide, leaving Cream to activate a speed power-up and spindash through the spikes to kill herself. It is implied this method killed off their souls, since Exeller needed them to activate the Master Emerald.
• End-Game Results Screen: Appears in both SOH and WOS. Where the game will show who got killed and who got to live at the end. Pointless, as in SOH is shown that everyone got killed regardless if you didn't went for the Best Ending. While in WOS sometimes it gets contradicted to who exactly is killed at end, and the timeline outside of Best Ending is reseted.
• Emerging from the Shadows: Alice does this in the Worst Ending, to confront Exeller.
• Enemy Mine:
  • In the Spirits Of Hell: Eggman, the main villain of Sonic universe, decides to team up with Heroes Tails and Knuckles, to fight back against Exeller.
  • In the Whisper Of Soul: Amy. Her morale compass gets completly breaked by revelation of Eggman killing her parents, and so she goes after him.
• Enemy-Detecting Radar: In the Spirits Of Hell: Tails and Eggman route will have it's enemy detector on Eggman's monitor, which will change depending on where Exeller went.
• Eaten Alive: In the Whisper Of Soul: During the Amy and Cream route. If playing as Amy, the Player will let darkness cover the screen fully, Amy dies as she gets eaten alive, symbolizing by her life icon getting blood on it. And the Tails and Cream route. At the end Tails gets corrupted by the curse transmitted by Tails Doll, and devours Cream's body.
• Eye Scream: Tails Doll loses his eye by Execun when protecting Cream, then Tails gets hit in his eye by Tails Doll when protecting Cream.
• Excessive Steam Syndrome: In Whisper Of Soul's Volcano Valley Cream Level, there will be an exagerrated amount of steam or Fog of War, is blocking your clear point of view, and if not careful, you may trigger onto an hidden spring and get launched to a ceiling of spikes above.
• Ending Fatigue: Discussed, in the Whisper Of Soul: At the end of it's development, Dan (The patient bear) just wanted it to be over with it, and wasn't shining with enthusiasm, which is probably by the amount of endings he had to make. (And thus the cancellation of the DLC, really got him burned out.)
  • Alternatively...It may relate to the player of a feeling that has "IS THERE MORE ENDINGS TO THIS?" type of feeling.
• Empty Eyes: During the Whisper Of Soul's Best Ending cutscene. Sally will talk about getting the army ready for the defense of the city, then Amy says something that makes it sound easy "I guess we have no choice, right?". Sally then replies with "Of course, you are telling this so easily... You're not the one who has to look into the eyes of the family of a dead person."
  • Armor-Piercing Question: Then it escalates into an clashing between Sally and Amy, in which Amy asks a question, "So you want to release your anger on me? Probably wishing I better died, right?" "Well, if you reminded me... Yes, it would've been better Rose! Just like your family!" after that the whole clashing abruptly ends, as the atmosphere of the room has reached it's peak, Sally leaves to give herself a "few minutes".
    • If We Survive This: Sally's alone time then will be interupted by Amy's intrusion, they will talk about how Amy used an machine to grow up, and what Amy did in the past to survive, After Sally's Father died, she promised to find her mother, as this is why she were in the tropical valley in the first place, to look for her, Amy then proposes that if they manage to survive this, she will help her with the search.
• Epic Fail: If you decide to help Sonic at the end of the Best Ending, it will get everyone killed, and get you denied of the Best Ending.
• "Everybody Dies" Ending: Worst Endings apply to this trope, but even more applies the
  • The Death of Death:Carnage Day ending, if during the worst ending boss, you purposely waste all of your lifes, Exeller suddenly dies via beheading, and gets vaporizied out of existence, Alice then soon follows, either from getting mortally wounded or connected to Exeller via life link. Then on a black screen, text follows, narrating what happened afterwards. Also a Breaking the Fourth Wall moment happens between the player and Exeller, as he will talk to him, discussing if he got all endings or not, if you try to skip his dialogue, he will disable enter.
• Empty Room Psych: In the Amy and Cream Duo Route: If during Character Select screen you will pick Cream, you will play an Hospital level with false sense of danger, is also a a second Flashlight level. Which if you played before, should have hazards, locked doors, and keys, to look for? Well not really. The Vanilla House section and This section are the only ones that have this flashlight mechanic. And this section has it for no good reason, because you can't die, even if you collide with the fake out ghosts, that temporarily Interface Screw your screen by obstructing your vision. That's it! That's all it does. Turning off your flashlight completly also doesn't kill you if you collide with them. One even pushes you out of his way, but doesn't kill you. Is literally a freebie level that you can use to skip Amy's prison level all together. This level also doesn't last very long.
• Everybody's Dead, Dave: Solo Routes have chances of triggering this trope.
• Early-Bird Cameo:
  • The giant monstrous, legless Sonic seen in Sky Sanctuary? That's Exebi, one of the Exeller clones.
  • Before his proper introduction, Exebi makes his first appearance after Sally successfully hides from fake Antoine, being the one who guided her out of the room.
• Earn Your Happy Ending:
  • The first game alone has the main trio (Tails, Knuckles, Eggman) go through dozens of time loops where they're hunted by a supernatural serial killer, and most of them end with one or more of said trio being violently killed. The player is locked into the worst ending on the first run, and only by meticulously finding secrets on all the stages and dodging Exceller can all three escape unscathed.
  • The second game expands upon this, and all six playable characters go through potentially hundreds of time loops seeing each other and their loved ones become corrupted murderers (on top of the horror and the trauma). It takes all six remaining alive and sane to make it through a given loop, and that takes all six developing their dèjá vu through being repeatedly killed/tortured/etc. in previous loops.
  • Also you won't be able to get the Best Ending straight away, as Exeller appears and tells you to get ALL Endings, before you are able to earn it, as he shuts down the game.
• Foreshadowing: Limp City. This is what will happen to the Freedom City if Sally fails to save it from Exeller. As Sally even notes on it just being the Freedom City, but turned red.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Amy and Sally, at seems they are both hostile with each other, after Amy's aging up fiasco of using Sally's machine that could have prevented old people from dying, gets broken after use, but in their route they put that aside, and start to work with each other, after they both make it on top of the tower however...Exeller pushes them off from it, resulting in Amy's death, that Sally griefs over with. Then is averted as the timeline is reset again, but in the Best Ending, they still manage to make up for it.
• Friend or Foe?: The Release trailer of Whisper Of Soul lampshades it by bringing this phrase in it.
• Funny Background Event: Downplayed, in one level of the Eggman and Knuckles route: There is a message that spells out the word "COPE"
• Floating Platforms: Some of them are used in the games.
• Flat "What": Many characters say this in their ambush scenes. Before they get brutally killed.
• Fragile Speedster: Cream, or so you think...
• Face Your Fears: In the Best Ending of Whisper Of Soul: Amy will fight against Metal Sonic in a boss battle, the robot that haunted her all these years, Amy will say that she decides to face her fear head on.
• Face–Monster Turn: Any Character that dies, turns to Exeller's side.
  • But Amy gets special threatment, as when she views her past, she gets turned (as what she says to Cream in her final moments) to a hell-bented monster, which has the only sole purpose of avenging her Family's death.
  • Tails Doll always gets infected when he tries to save Cream, his eye is damaged by what presumed to be Execun, then his infection gets stronger depending on if anyone out of the main cast died. In some routes Tails Doll deliberately Heroic Suicides in order to avert turning completly, or not...as he then rewards Cream for saving him, by killing her in return.
• Flashbacks: The Whisper Of Soul has a lot of those, they appear mostly after the credits of an ending, with some expections, they also happen in gameplay.
• Foreseeing My Death: In the Sally and Cream route. Cream gets caught and as they prepare to kill her via speed monitor, (the same fate that she can die to in the first part of the game) she suddenly remembers this happening to her, and then turns tables around and launches Amy into that trap.
• Family-Friendly Firearms: Subverted. Eggman carries a blaster with him but it's lethal, and can penetrate through soft, smaller targets and leave horrible wounds even on a glancing hit.
• Fighting from the Inside: The green rings have the power to temporarily suppress Exeller, enabling the real Sonic to take control of himself before Exeller eventually retakes control. The true ending and Knuckles and Tails route in Spirits of Hell also has the real Sonic briefly gain control, telling them to run.
• Flash Sideways: Implied during the first game and explicitly shown after the worst ending of Whisper of Soul. Exeller's mastery of time magic means he can reset the timeline all he wants... but the unintended side effect of this magic is that everyone involved eventually gets flashes of deja vu that show them what happened in previous iterations. After one of the playable characters has died in a previous run, they'll get a sudden memory of their usual death at key moments.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • If you take a close look at a memory fragment that depicts the mural in the Hidden Palace, it will briefly change for a split second, with Tails even noticing it. It depicts a final battle between Exeller and the 6 chosen ones inside his mind.
  • During Amy's escape inside the Prison Tower, she can catch a glimpse of shadowy monsters lurking the complex.
  • When Amy encounters Exeller for the second time and Metal Sonic during the true ending route, the two will flicker for a split second that reveal their true forms (the very same Highest that Sally meets in her routes, and Metal Sonic's damaged body respectively).
• Familial Body Snatcher: The events of the game happen because Exeller toke control of Sonic, and only Sonic, because Exeller's spirit animal as he said was a hedgehog, and it just so happened to be Sonic.
• Fatal Flaw: Amy Rose's flaw is her parents. If she ever finds out that Eggman killed them, she won't stop until he is dead. At all costs.
• Fire Purifies: Averted. It does not damage Exeller in any way during the Cream's Failed Route Boss Battle with him.
• Freudian Excuse: Exeller seemed to have a crush on a second-class Highest named Laura. However, Laura died shortly after they started dating (while it's unknown why, it's implied that a curse was put on Exeller that would harm anyone he came in contact with, such as those he unintentionally hurt, and that he did it For the Evulz; while third-class Highests are not allowed to have romantic relationships, Exeller is not a third-class Highest, but rather a Zero-class). This prompted Exeller to murder the king of the Highests, despite Alice's objections.
• Game-Over Man: Exeller will appear during the Continue screens, and if you waste all of your lives on one section, a cutscene will play where he has killed the character you were controlling. If you manage to kill them all, the Game Over screen will appear, with the murdered heroes along with the him looking directly into the screen. He also makes an appearance even if he is not really there during the continue screen, as when it reaches zero, his laugh will play during it.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: In the DLC. Despite having Immortality, Exeller gets a Health Bar and he is killed if it depletes. It is intended to have an effect on the INSANITY meter if you die this way, and also Exeller will try to warn the player not to test his luck by trying to actively kill him.
• Grew Beyond Their Programming: Tails doll, Claims that he gained free will from his Chaos Emerald, with the ability to make his own choices, that he makes by saving Cream from Execun, at the cost of getting infected with the virus.
• Going in Circles: What Tails claims Exeller did to him and the others in the Amy and Tails duo ending.
  Tails: If only I was there... With her... Exeller just drove us in circles..''
• Green Hill Zone: The first ever level in the Spirits Of Hell. And the very first level that started Sonic's first game with.
• Goddamned Boss: VS Cream (Eggman Version): Will make you blindly guess which way to shoot a laser at, to hit Cream, she will also get progressively faster the more you damage her, but she does follow a pattern.
• "Get Back Here!" Bosses: In the Whisper Of Soul, those bosses are as followed: Tails Doll in the Tails and Cream Duo Route, Vs Metal Sonic in the Best Ending route, and lastly VS Ultimate Execun, those bosses will make you run on a trendmill to get them.
• Guns Are Worthless: Eggman's Gun. Won't work on Exeller, as he shrugs it off, in the Amy and Eggman conditional ending. and Shooting Execun and Exebi will only stun them, and won't be able to kill them at all. Averted by Crazy Amy Route, as it has the power to rip a hole in Amy's mouth, but that didn't kill her. Luckfully, Cream can change that....
• Goodbye, Cruel World!: Word for word as Amy says this in her solo route, before jumping off onto incoming flying badniks, in hopes of hitching a ride. Or die trying.
  • Die or Fly: She either hitches a ride, or falls to her death.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: When fighting against Knuckles.exe in the Tails and Sally route. When Knuckles gets defeated he says something about getting Tails "Next time", then suddenly images of memories flash as Tails realises that this is not the first time he done this, and that there were more timelines than he went through, he gets to an mad point, as he realises what he must do. When approaching Sally, he tricks her, and does an Murder-Suicide.
  • Tails and Cream route: In the ending, Tails finds out that he consumed Cream's flesh, starts to go mad, and he just continues to eat her down, to the bones.
• Golden Path: Cream's endings get more content, than all of the main cast.
• Golden Ending: In order to unlock the good ending in the sequel where everyone survives, you must first find all other endings. That means forcing other characters to die and let others live as a result.
• Goo-Goo-Godlike: Discussed, Cream is a 6 year old rabbit child, but she gets through so much turmoil, lengths, and feats, that .exe community literally gave her the title of an True Main Protagonist and that the game should have been Cream.exe The Whisper Of Soul, she also gets more endings than the whole cast itself! She can beat the pursuing gang of her demonizied friends, by luring them into traps that put them out of commision, and turning them against each other!. She can beat Tails Doll, with the help of a Fire Ring as a shield at the start of the fight, but without using it in the boss fight itself. The way how she keeps getting away with this, would really make the whole other Main Cast characters to Envy. But her role in the Best Ending, plays like a Big Chekhov's mounted cannon on top of the stairs. As the Team successfully protects all of the main generators, defeats Broken Metal Sonic, they come face to face with the Ultimate Execun. Sally thinks that they can beat it, since they can probably take it by their amount of members. Wrong. He instantly incapacitates them all expect CREAM! This is where the Unique Protagonist Asset shines, and that's why it seals this trope, she doesn't have any hidden evil devils, deeds or sins inside of her, due to her only being a child, she can't sin yet at such age, then Ultimate Execun finds an string to pull on, her Mother's death, it puts her off-balance, but not for long as you beat the QTE it puts you through, she snaps out of it, and theme called IS CREAM TIME starts playing in the background, and you bet it is CREAM TIME, because you will have to fight the most difficult boss fight, in your life, and you will have to beat it to get the best ending, is the last barrier that remains in the way, anything that comes after will seem to you like Child's Play. But after that, her Role is essentially fulfiled, in the VS Exeller fight, she once again takes on the role of Support Party Member as she can heal health back up if you let her charge her ability.
• Gainax Ending: The Whisper of Soul's Best Ending: They defeat Exeller, and then he gives Sally an opportunity to ask the remaining lore questions she has, she in return doesn't seem to be interested in his past but asks them anyways, but only three of them, as after that, it shifts her back to where they standed nearby with the others. Sally is waking up only to see Sonic's unconscious body on the ground, and something (That is presumed Exeller) having glowing evil red eyes in the darkness, then it ends like that on a cliffhanger. The series has also been cancelled, so is unlikely that Dan will ever come back to finish it.
• Gameplay Ally Immortality: During the Knuckles and Cream route. The game will give us Cream as a walking AI Ally. You can trigger her path finding to walk off the ledge and kill herself, but that won't count as the same thing will happen in the Sonic 2, she will respawn.
• Glorious Death: Those vary from character to character. Amy's prefered way seemed to be falling from high heights. Cream's prefered way are spikes. Tails's ways, anything that gets the job done, painful or not.
• Greater-Scope Villain: All-Father is implied to be the cause of Exeller's Start of Darkness, much like with Exetior. This information, however, has not been confirmed.
• "Groundhog Day" Loop: Present and explicitly used in both games, since Exeller has the power to reset the timeline any time he wants, usually after a bad ending so he can put the characters and the player through his murderous games again.
• Gang Up on the Human: Subverted, in the Cream's Solo route: Exeller's Demonized gang will gang up upon Cream, Tails will be hoaming upon her, and Knuckles will come out of the ground from time to time, others will be standing statically and attack when getting close to, which will force Cream to turn her hazards against them.)
• Gullible Lemmings: If Sally's killed in Limp City, Execun (in Sally's disguise) will take over and deceive the citizens of Freedom City into declaring Sonic a wanted criminal, and ordering all the Freedom Fighters into killing anybody outside of Freedom City who are attempting to flee inside to a safe haven. The Freedom Fighters (including Rotor) do it without questioning about this morally ambiguous order from someone who's supposed to be sane or even bother to check if Sally's an imposter (especially since ordering the deaths of any innocents who attempt to enter is something that the real Sally would disapprove).
• Heads I Win, Tails You Lose: Beating "Exeller" in Whisper Of Soul's Best Ending is this, as he already managed to achieve the Master Emerald he was craving for, if you lose during his fight, he will just drag you back to the start of the fight, it will loop around for as long as you can't beat him, if you do win, he will provide an opportunity for Sally to ask her three questions, then as she does so, she will find Sonic unconscious, and something that has red glowing eyes in the darkness....Is a win never then less for Exeller.
• Heroic Willpower: Sally in her Cream and Sally route: When Cream begs Demonized Sally to spare her, she can bring her family up, which is her weak spot (as she was still in searches for her missing mother.) that will make Sally doubt herself on why she is doing this, Demonized Amy will appear to tell her get this over with this, calling her a fool if she doesn't, (knowing her hostile interaction with Amy, this was a poor choice of words.) makes Sally turn on Amy, as she covers Cream with her shield while drawing the sword on her, which shocks her, this gives Cream a chance to escape while she thanks her for everything.
  • This gets averted if you try to bring up her friends instead, which makes Sally make barbeque out of Cream.
• How We Got Here: Implied in the Whisper Of Soul: If you switch to story page, all main characters are shown to be already together, but they are in a cave for some reason.
• Heroes Prefer Swords: One of the main heroes, Sally. Wields a Sword like device, that can send out elemental powers.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: In Spirits Of Hell: Knuckles sets up an ambush trap switch in his solo route, which backfires into him opening the door with it, rather than activating the trap, Exeller then uses this opportunity to behead him using the same switch he used to open the door.
• Halfway Plot Switch: The game will switch to an different Character once he is safe and sound, both of them then should meet up with each other.
• Heroic Sacrifice: It does has it's share of those heroic efforts.
  • Chronic Hero Syndrome: Knuckles in his case, would literally drop himself into harm's way to save the others.
    • Senseless Sacrifices: Which in return won't help that much, since they will kill themselfes anyways, or even worse, turned into a statue.
• Heroic BSoD: In the Knuckles and Cream route. Cream will make a run for it, as Knuckles does an Heroic Sacrifice to get Cream to live for some time. Then she gets surrounded, closes her eyes and turns into a ball, as she cries her soul out to spare her, but then the whole scene around her turns into a void, and there is nothing around her anymore. Her only choice is to move forward into the abyss.
• Hope Spot: Has a lot of moments in both of the games. Or even consisted of.
• House Fire: Implied, In the failed Amy and Cream route. Rotor reveals that the Cream's house got destroyed, (but he doesn't say HOW exactly it got destroyed) in it, two corpses were found, which Rotor presumes as Vanilla and Cream, he brings this main arguement during the Cream's pleads to let her in.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: In the Failed Amy and Cream Duo route, When Exeller starts taunting her about her father's death, Cream transforms into her fire form to fight back against Exeller. Unamused, Exeller starts to "Fight" her. In reality, Exeller was just holding back, and he abruptly ends the fight midway when he gets bored. It doesn't even show a tutorial before this fight, when you normally get introduced to new mechanics. (Which would have hit much harder) Even though the new HUD appears to show her "power", it's also impossible to die in this battle, and there is no way to beat him, rendering defeat the only condition you get.
  • Long Song, Short Scene: Cream gets an upbeat hopefull boss theme, all for herself, which then gets cutted off by Exeller.
• Hospital Epilogue: Downplayed, in the Cream and Amy route. The duo gets sended to seperate places, the place that looks like a Hospital, and the other to Prison, but yet NO ONE had suffered any injuries. So hard to say. They later have to escape into the woods.

And also Amy and Tails Route. They also end up there, when Tails cuts his hand to show that he is real, he gets sented there with Bunnie, he later finds some pills and overdoses with Amy in the room.

• Half The Girl She Used To Be: In the Sally's continued screen, if you give up, Exeller will grab Sally to the nearby sawblade, puts her under it, and slices her in half.
• Homing Projectile: In the Best Ending's boss Ultimate Execun. One of Amy's attacks is a hammer throw that becomes a homing projectile.
• Hell Is That Noise: Vanilla's attack has a sound cue, and you will need to be on a look out once it happens.
• Hanging Around: Knuckles and Vanilla are shown be the ones hanging around in the Game Over Sequence.
• I'd Tell You, but Then I'd Have to Kill You: If Amy falls for Exeller's bait of revealing her past, she gets turned into a hell-bented monster, and if the Round 1 Trio is seperated at that moment, Exeller just kills her there. Regardless if Eggman is dead or alive.
  Amy: "Dr.Robotnik... Is he still alive?"
  Exeller: "He is (alive)dead... And unfortunately you're useless to me... For now."
• Idle Animation: Everyone gets those mostly, some are unique to an particular scene or level.
• It's Quiet… Too Quiet: In one of the Game Over Sequences of the Best Ending. Tails utters this line, right before they get their power cut off, and then killed.
• It's Personal: Crazy Amy route: She forgets about her struggles with Exeller the moment he shows her who killed her parents, it was Eggman, and now it has became personal for her.
• Inner Monologue: All of the main cast are subject to this, they seem to monologue everything around them when they are all alone.
  • Thinking Out Loud: Again, when they are all alone. They will talk out loud.
• Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: Downplayed. In the Whisper Of Soul's first part, you will find a Forester's Gate blocking Amy's way. Is possibile to try to jump over it, but there will be an invisibile wall in the way. So either find a Key or Break it.
• I Knew There Was Something About You: "Hmph, somehow, I knew i'll find you here" said by Exeller to Alice in the Worst Ending route.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Sally, Cream and Alice: Both of them get impaled with sharp things, Sally gets tricked by Tails in their duo route, as he impales Sally, with her own weapon. Alice in the Crazy Amy route gets impaled by Exeller's arm that turned into a spike. Not on purpose as he averts it by saving her. and Cream, She will get pierced by spikes, and ripped apart if you don't discover a Dead Cheese in the Bingo Festival.
• Indy Escape: The moments in which you have to run in a straight line to escape the threat, in the Round 1 (Don't forget to jump!). And the same thing in the Round 2, but in more amount of, even in the cutscenes.
• Interface Screw: Exeller can crush Amy with the Continue text, meanwhile in the Sally's solo Route, Execun uses it as well, but as a projectile. And then there is a Cream and Knuckles ending level, where the screen will get progressively covered up by Exeller's Slasher Smile Image, at the end it gets so fully covered up, that you can barely see anything.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: In the first game, although it only sets the amount of (non-recoverable) lives.
  • Poor Child - 15 lives
  • Weak - 10 lives
  • Brave - 5 lives
  • Nightmare - One-Hit-Point Wonder (you also unlock level select code, if you beat the best ending with this)
    • Video-Game Lives: In the Whisper Of Soul, you will be only given 5 lifes for the entire game, the count may go up if you find the Life Monitors, which are scarce. Thank god for the Level Select.
• In Working Order: Exeller's diaries are being set as some kind of red orbs that other characters can freely interact with.
• I'm a Humanitarian: During Tails' and Cream's duo ending, their elevator gets stuck on the way to the Master Emerald. After a brief chat, they settle down to nap and Tails notes he hasn't eaten in 2 days... when he wakes up, he finds blood in his mouth, his body half-corrupted, and Cream's chewed corpse behind him, having killed her while she was asleep and devouring some of her body. He then snaps, is trapped in the elevator, and continues eating her body down to the bones.
• Join or Die: Vanilla gets forced to do this on her own daughter Cream, and many others, is not like a choice because if they die, they still get demonizated anyways.
• Jump Scare: These happen in both games.
• Just a Kid: Cream admits it on herself. She is just a 6 year old kid. While Tails Doll in the Best Ending tries to avert it by saying that she is not five anymore.
• Just Toying with Them: This is perhaps the only reason why Exeller allows Cream to fight him in Amy and Cream's alternate duo run; he wants to see how her abilities will go upon utilizing the Fire Ring's innate powers, but once he's had enough, he quickly ends the battle by throttling her.
• Knockback: Getting hit by damage, will knock the character backwards.
• Kill the Cutie: Round 2 cast.
• Karma Meter: In the DLC, you can choose to kill or spare people in your way, which will affect some cutscenes.
• Kill the Ones You Love: VS fights are this.
• Kirk Summation: What Amy tries to do in her Solo Ending: Amy tries to find out why Exeller didn't kill her in the void, to which he says that "I WASN'T THERE." which then becomes an Ass Pull moment, because if you look up Amy's past, when Round 1 is seperated, Exeller proceeds to kill her off anyways....Somehow...
• Know When to Fold 'Em: Some characters, know when to run or give up, some of them do it in their own way, via escape on a train, running off into the forest, or Driven to Suicide.
• Kill One, Others Get Stronger: Inverted, on the opposite, if anyone dies, it will make the Big Bad stronger, and his tracking of people gets stronger too.
• Killed Offscreen: What Exeller says he does to them when you achieve any ending than the best one in the Spirits Of Hell.
• Knockout Gas: In the Amy and Cream Duo route: Rotor uses an Knock Out Gas to subdue both Cream and Amy.
• Knight in Sour Armor: Almost everyone tries this way of keep going, meeting the danger up ahead.
• Kill and Replace: Execun has already killed Antoine and took on his appearance intending to copy Sally's later on. If Sally's killed in Limp City or fails the Clicking QTE, then Execun will copy her look and take over Freedom City.
• Locked Out of the Loop: Amy should not find out the truth behind her parents' deaths.
• Lame Comeback: When Rexer comes to confront Exeller against his crimes, Exeller will utter this:
  Exeller: "Of course, it's easy to judge when you don't know the facts. Screw you both."
  Rexer: "Those were your last words..."
• Lethal Klutz: Knuckles, if he gets paired with either Amy or Cream, they both die during his duty.
• Loophole Abuse: During the Sally's Non-Standard Game Over of Best Ending. The city's fate is doomed, the generators that helded the defenses against all monsters that were trying to invade the city are FUBAR, Sally assess that she is still alive and tries to call on the radio for Status Report, which confirms her fears, as Knuckles says that they are heading for the tower and he is trying to..- Gets cut off midsentence, as Sally tries to call out his name desperately, then she tries to call up Tails, who is visibily disturbed in his tone, as he states Sally that "They're breaking in." Cream is also being mentioned while he says it, then he gets cut off. Which puts Sally into more of a panic state, Exeller then arrives to tell Sally that the city is already doomed, and "In a few minutes the city will be full of monsters. Bad fate for a town isn't it? And the heroes have failed." as he rubs it in, Sally begs him to spare the citizens of the city, by making a deal with Exeller, that she surrenders her soul to him in exchange of "Saving the citizens of the city." Exeller accepts it and "Teleports the CITIZENS" out of the city, as Exeller suggests Sally to say their final goodbyes to her friends, she is horrifed to find out that Exeller, only just DID teleport all citizens out of the city, as she hears their voices get cut off one by one, as Tails confirms that Amy and Robotnik are dead on his cameras, he says that he is not gonna make it out alive, before the signal cuts off he apologizes one last time. As Sally finds out that she was played by Exeller, he then explains that her Friends weren't part of the deal, and seals her away into an emerald.
  Sally: "We had a deal!"
  Exeller: "And i've done my part of the deal. I've teleported CITIZENS of the freedom city... But sadly, your friends are not citizens."
  Sally: "You knew exactly what I meant!"
• Lethal Lava Land: Volcano Valley.
• Left Hanging: Spoilers for the Best Ending of Round 2: So you beaten Exeller, then after that Sally gets transported back to where they were standing near the Master Emerald, Sonic's body is on the ground, and some kind of weird Red Eyes are starting to peak out from the darkness. And it ends. Like that. With some loose ends left untied as to what happens next.
• Last Chance to Quit: What Exeller suggests Cream to do in the Failed Amy and Cream Route: She however then proceeds to get a "The Reason You Suck" Speech from Exeller, telling her that she was part of the reason that her father died. And instead tries to fight back against Exeller, using a fire ring's powers.
• Lock and Key Puzzle: Forester's Gate needs an key, or does it? to escape Vanilla's house? You need to go through sequence of searching to find a single key to unlock the door out to escape. To unlock a door in the Bingo Festival you need a whole lot of those to get through it. In there you will find Dead Cheese.
• Let's Split Up, Gang!: In the Amy and Sally Duo route: They both split up to get to their goal faster. Also Best Ending, but it's justified. Since everyone need to defend generators in the different places far away than they are.
• Limited Window of Vulnerability: In the Spirits Of Hell: If you grab an Green Ring or Black Ring, they both will stun Exeller under curtain conditions, as Eggman seem to comment on him being scared of it.
• Last Survivor Suicide: Cream Solo Route. If Cream decides at one moment to get cold feet. She can decide to throw the City's fate to the wolfes. And leave, but not too far as she then gets Survivor Guilt, and commits (you guessed it) suicide. It will not count as an ending, so you stil have to pick the other option.
• Line in the Sand: In the Best Ending of Whisper Of Soul, Sally will request volunteers for the upcoming defense against Exeller.
• Lost Pet Grievance: Whisper Of Soul will open for the searches of Cream's lost pet chao named Cheese, Amy kinda forgets this objective mid-way due to Sonic distracting her to visit some place quiet...But in the Cream's part. If you lose the chase against an butterfly, and find all 6 talismans to unlock the locked door, Cream will find that her pet was Dead All Along.
• Lack of Empathy: Downplayed and results in a Jerk with a Heart of Gold instead. In the Crazy Amy Route, The one where Cream doesn't shot Amy. Amy kills Robotnik by smashing his head in, with her hammer. Then Exeller appears and executes them with no remorse, both of them. He literally appears and crushes Amy underneath, with his weight and power. And then Cream gets annihilated, there is nothing left of her. Then Alice arrives and reprimands Exeller for being this way. Then in a fit of rage he lashes out on Alice and stabs her fatally. Realizing what have he done. He tries an spell which can only bring her back, if he had some good features left in him. And it works.
  • Don't You Dare Pity Me!: Afterwards Alice then proceeds to Hug Exeller, as she realizes that he stil has something good left in him. The Exeller is caught off-guard by this, he seemed to briefly accept it in response. The moment lasts about 10 seconds, before Exeller shoves her away onto the ground, and tries to come up with excuses as to why it worked out, but then the timeline gets reset.
• Mind Rape:
  • In Spirits Of Hell: Knuckles is forced to collect Red Rings that puts him into a panic state, while once solid walls disappear in that state, with a drawback of Exeller's illusion following behind his trail, in a Non-Standard Game Over, he is seen kneeling on the floor while the illusions of Exeller are hovearing over him, as Exeller throws a spike into his head, killing him instantly.
  • In Whisper Of Soul: Tails is subjected to this in his last of his Solo Ending, he will walk in the void, while illusions of people are flashing over his eyes, if he fails, he falls to his knees while grasping his head tightly, Exeller then appears and kills him off.
• Meaningless Villain Victory:
  • Spirits Of Hell: If Exeller succeeds at killing the trio, he will just reset the timeline, bringing you back to the main title.
  • Whisper Of Soul: The same thing happens, but this time Exeller has other plans, as fight against Alice follows, he then quickly changes his mind, as he gets overwhelmed by the rage inside of him. To which they both agree to reset it.
• More than Mind Control: Exeller's demonized victims, and Amy turning into hell bented monster is this. As Exeller says that he "Pushes some buttons to break people."
• Mind Screw: In Whisper Of Soul: Tails Solo route is this.
• Mood Whiplash: Tails and Cream route: When you beat Tails Doll, both Cream and Tails talk about good things to lighten the mood, then after they take a rest. Tails wakes up to see Cream's eatten corpse on the ground, as Tails deduces that he himself did it to her, he starts to Go Mad from the Revelation, and just continues to eat her down to the bones.
• Marathon Boss: Vs Ultimate Execun, and this boss does drag on for a good while, with his 5 Sequential Mini-Bosses in between. Almost passing as the Boss Bonanza, or maybe it already did.
• Missing Secret: The Tails vs. Eggman boss fight in the Knuckles and Eggman duo route ​was Dummied Out. Subverted due to the battle being available in the Level Select.
• Mooks: Averted. Much like the Nightmare Beginning (and its sequels), both games lack Badniks as the primary adversaries. Instead, you have to run and hide from Exeller (plus his lackeys in the sequel), befitting for a survival horror game. However, it does have a few stages that feature combat.
• Mook Chivalry: During the Whisper of Soul's Best Ending boss: Ultimate Execun when hitted 3 times, can only send out Cream's corrupted friends, one at the time.
• My Hero, Zero: Exeller as an highest, has an class applied to him as Class Zero, the most powerfull of them all
• Morality Pet: Alice is this for Exeller. Justified since it's implied that Alice is Exeller's sister.
• Made of Iron: In the Crazy Amy route: Amy gets shot by Robotnik in the mouth at point blank range, tearing a hole in her mouth, her response? Giving them both a head start.
• Making the Choice for You: In the Crazy Amy route: Depending on the choice you made as Tails earlier, when Cream gets Eggman's gun he dropped in the chase. She will have to solve a Sadistic Choice herself, instead of the Player, relying only on what Tails said earlier. She will either shoot Amy or let Amy kill Robotnik.
• Manipulative Bastard: Part of what Exeller does to his victims before killing them off, or as he says, "Pushing certain buttons" to make them to go off the rails... Oddly enough, Tails is quite resistant to this.
• My Name Is ???: Some character's names are instead replaced with Question marks in the Whisper Of Soul, until someone says or mentions their name. In the characters page of the main menu, both character's names will be hidden away, as the game claims this information to be "not important for mortals."
• Multiple Endings: It plays out straight in Spirits Of Hell, having The Worst ending, Solos, Duos, and Trio endings, which makes up for a count of 8 unique endings. In the Whisper Of Soul however, it plays out not fully straight, there are moments where curtain routes, make it imposibile for them to happen, for example, if you kill off Amy and Cream in the first part, they will appear in the first Ultimatum, and without a choice, kill the whole round 1 in one go. Which make it imposibile for Round 1 and Sally route. And so on. There are also other not obvious ways to trigger other routes.
  • Guide Dang It!: There exists an Failed Amy and Cream Duo Route, an Crazy Amy route, and the Carnage Day ending, which only happens at curtain conditions. In total a whole whopping 21 endings (That the game counts as the main ones) in Whisper Of Soul, which is a commendable feat in the sonic.exe community. Find out how to find them your own.
• No-Sell: In the Whisper Of Soul: Before starting the Volcano Valley Tails level, a cutscene plays where Tails tries to behead Exeller in the same way as he did in his Spirits Of Hell solo, but it proves uneffective, as Tails finds out that he can't be killed all this time.
  Tails : "Y-You are immortal?"
• Non-Standard Game Over:
  • In the Spirits Of Hell: If you waste all of your lifes on Tails part, you will be treated to a cutscene of Exeller overlooking his next victim, Knuckles. The same thing would happen with Knuckles, but he will be addreasing to the player, and dying on Eggman, will have his body ripped in half. Some routes even get unique cutscenes for dying. If for example Tails and Knuckles die before they meet up with Exeller, he will have his decapitated heads in his hands, if in Tails and Eggman route Tails dies, Eggman decides to escape while he still can. Or if Eggman dies to a wrong choice, Tails will be executed in the darkness.
  • In the Whisper Of Soul: Since it's a bigger game than Spirits Of Hell, not every level has this feature.
• No Body Left Behind: Exeller and Alice both vanish if they die.
• "Not So Different" Remark: Exeller repeats this speech twice in the Whisper Of Soul: In the Carnage Day ending when talking to the Player, the only difference he picks between himself and the Player is that he kills too, but not in the Real Life. Then in the Best Ending's Final Boss, when Exeller starts talking to Tails, he will mention about an universe where he was the Villain. And that both of them are "Not so Different" in response to this, Tails delivers back a Shut Up, Hannibal! speech, saying that is not true.
• Naïve Every Girls: Amy and Cream, Exeller in one of the Amy's death scene, will say directly that "You girls are so naïve."
• Nostalgia Level: There is one level in the Whisper Of Soul, title named as "Deja Vu." And there is also Tails's own Deja Vu levels. Eggman seem to be the only one lacking this.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Exeller tries to do this when Rexer finds out that he is him in Sonic's disguise, he still tries to follow his act by denying knowing Rexer in the slightest, which doesn't work.
  (Sonic)Exeller: "Do I know you?"
  Rexer: "I already know it's you Exeller, don't play dumb with me."
• Oh, Crap!: The most iconic one happens in the Whisper Of Soul: If Sally is the only one left alive in the third part of the game, she will discuss about not finding anyone in Volcano Valley, as demonized Amy and Cream will sneak up on her and answer her otherwise that she has found them. And that they came to kill her, revealing her that this is where her story ends. Sally's expression manifests into of a Wide Eyes and Shrunken Irises expression, as she instantly breaks into a sprint to get away from them.
  • Mass "Oh, Crap!": Round 1 crew in the Whisper Of Soul: If anyone dies during the first part of the game, it will interupt Sally's first part, by cutting back to the trio being surprised. As then Exeller brings out the girls to murder them, their expressions switch to shock, horror and disbelief.
    • In their ambush scenes, they also show those expressions when they are about to be killed by them.
• Out of Focus: In the Whisper Of Soul: Eggman, gets the least amount of endings for himself.
• Off with His Head!: The games feature some moments where a character gets beheaded. Those are Exeller's clone in Tails Solo, Exeller himself in the Carnage Day Ending, Tails, Knuckles.
• Older Than They Look: The highests in game are portrayed to have an comical amount of years behind them, than they appear to be. For example, Exeller is confirmed to be 3,999 years old.
• Out-of-Character Moment: If Amy loses to Metal Sonic in the true ending route. The remaining four will run across Cream's corpse (implied to be killed by Metal Sonic). When they notice that Amy's missing, Knuckles uncharacteristically tells Sally to go alone and find her with Robotnik agreeing to the idea (much to Sally's confusion). As Exeller explains; the out of character behavior from Eggman and Knuckles is all in Sally's head (via Exeller's Mind Manipulation); she's demoralized from Cream's death, hence she began to hear voices that are inaccurate to the true situation (i.e. Eggman and Knuckles actually told Sally that they'll be going with her to find Amy, only for Sally to reject the offer and go by herself).
• Out of the Inferno: During Volcano Valley levels, there is a running theme of characters escaping from the lava flowing down behind them.
• Outside-Context Problem: In Whisper of Soul, a number of endings involve the protagonist living to the end, only to get killed (or subjected to worse fates) by beings that are not part of the setting's dimension, such as Knuckles' solo route ending with him getting turned into a Chaos Emerald by a deranged Sonic that is completely unknown to Exeller and barely understood by his associates, and Cream falling into a black void and getting turned into a garden statue by Exetior, and finally, In the Tails and Sally route, where if you pick Sally to fight the RouteBosses. Tails appears and out of the blue kills Sally and then himself. If you play as Tails instead, it's shown that he gets broken from the revelation of the time loops and comes to the thought that he did this already before, and maybe in the next timeline he would get better, so then he goes to Sally...
• Person of Mass Destruction: Exeller is this, one big massive weapon of Mass Destruction. He is immortal and cannot be killed, along with potent magic abilities and strength.
• Punch Catch: Sonic does this when Amy senses an dark figure approaching her from behind, and throws a punch, which Sonic intercepts before it can collide with him, as Amy instantly apologizes and asks if he isn't hurt, although...is weird that he hasn't boosted in quite a while...
• Press Start to Game Over:
  • In Whisper Of Soul, you can kill Amy really quickly by failing an QTE.
  • In the Spirits Of Hell, Player can collide with Exeller that is hiding on the palmtree in the Green Hill level, killing Tails instantly with no continues.
• Prepare to Die: "Time to die sucker!" - Exeller
• Posthumous Character: Rexer, after being killed by Exeller, continues to guide Sally out of the dimension Exeller threw her in, turns out he is just an illusion that he made before attacking Exeller.
• Platform Hell: In the Spirits Of Hell: Eggman's level "..." has a Difficulty describing one part as HELL for a reason.
  • In the Whisper Of Soul:
    • Amy's Solo Route level, has disappearing platforms, which if you decide to go through the lower part of the level instead of skipping it by jumping straight and landing on the upper level, you will fall due to it's weird timing of platforms disappearing and die.
    • Knuckles will encounter those in the Best Ending route, just glide over them...If you can spare the time to.
    • Cream's Solo Route level, Danger Spectre has Landmines where if you step on them three times, will detonate and kill Cream. It doesn't help that it also launches you if Cream steps on them, which can get you tossed around between two mines, and will get you killed if you won't hop off that roller coaster in time.
• Plot Coupon That Does Something: In the Amy and Cream Duo route: Amy can find an Fire Ring, which can be used as a Safety Net in case you fail the upcoming QTE or die as Amy in the Prison level. If you don't grab it Cream will freeze to death if you fail an QTE. And if Amy dies in the Prison level, and Cream has no Fire Ring, the game would still put you through an level anyways, until Cream finds Tails Doll in her way, as Fire Ring should normally save her. This time however, Tails Doll obliterates Cream's face off. In the Spirits Of Hell: There are rings littered around in each character's levels, they are mostly placed in the beginning, Black Rings will require you to traverse through the level, then backtrack back to the beginning of an level after you reached some distance, it will spawn a Black Ring back there, which when grabbed will act as a save net for Solo Routes, Green Rings if grabbed, will save you from a Bad Choice, which will become useless if you already know what to pick to not die. Oh, and they can be only used once.
• Power Born of Madness: Due to Exeller's nature, in the DLC it gets revealed that he has an INSANITY meter. To lower it down, he has to kill people in brutal ways. Which you can make the choice yourself. If the INSANITY meter gets filled up, he will go off the rails entirely and just destroy Mobius in a violent rage.
• Precocious Crush: Somewhat Straight. In Whisper Of Soul, it would be hard to notice but Cream has a crush on Tails, the only 3 signs the games gives to those are:

When Cream starts to talk about Tails and how she worries that he is stil alive, Tails Doll notices that her heart rate gets spiked up when she says it.In the Unused Cutscene she makes it clear that she always wanted him together with her. (A shame is unused)In the Best Ending, Tails has to leave his safe spot to activate the generator, after he leaves, Cream says that she doesn't want him to die...

• Please Wake Up: Whisper Of Soul's Failed Amy and Cream route. If the player fails an QTE, Amy and Cream get shot down by Rotor's people, and they both will fall into a Cold Lake, Amy saves Cream from drowning in the Lake, she begs her to wake up...as she thinks she was too late to save her she lays down pale and white, and she dies, with her final words being "No..." a big denial words to all this. Cream can survive if she has a fire ring that Amy gave her. But at what cost?
• Press X to Not Die: Plays Straight. There are literally many sequences in Whisper Of Soul, where you need to press or mash the X button to not die. In Sonic Forces fashion, oh and also OSU inspired mini-game. And press the button in right moment, so that it lands in the middle part of the screen. Failing those render death, expect THAT one route... Most of them were literally made to kill off the main cast faster. In the most silly way possibile.
• Protagonist Title Fallacy: The titles have the name Sonic.exe (Spirits Of Hell) and Sally.exe (Whisper Of Soul), while neither of them can even get close to an True Protagonist title, Sonic is only playable in the first level, and Sally barely can be called as such, because the game seem to have it's spot light, targeted on Cream rather than Sally, due to Cream having more endings than her.
• Prophecies Are Always Right: In the Whisper of Soul, it gets revealed that a prophecy is taking place, it's about 6 main heroes taking on against the Big Bad himself, Exeller. And for it to not come true, Exeller must dispose of them.
• Pyrrhic Victory: Even if you beat the bosses or make it till the end in the non-best ending routes, is still will be an Pyrrhic Victory for them, as Exeller is never defeated, timeline is reset, or something doesn't go as planned for the heroes.
• Prophecy Twist: The prophecy, was destined that the six main heroes, them being Round 1 and Round 2 cast, would take on Exeller in a fight, it even gets lampshaded early in the Knuckles Vs Sonic memory fragment, but only for a split second, then when the Best Ending comes, it does really happen, they do fight against Exeller, but they don't defeat him, as he simply is still in the control of how things goes, Sally wakes up to see him still standing, as he allows her to ask any burning questions she may want answers to, (which she especially doesn't want to, but is forced to by Exeller, as the game can only progress after asking those three questions) then as she does, Exeller says that there are no questions left, and scene cuts to white, to show Round 1 and Round 2 cast still in knockout, while Sally wakes up early, to see Sonic's body free from the possesion, then there is darkness ahead of him, with Red eyes staring back, The Prophecy did happened as it did, but it didn't defeat Exeller...
• Patchwork Fic: The past of the gang seems to be this between Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) and Fleetway's Sonic the Comic, as Amy and Sally are rather close to their pre-reboot Archie versions,^note Though Amy aging up here is due to a machine Sally is working on as opposed to a Ring of Acorns while Robotnik's past with Sonic before starting his world domination plans is similar to his Fleetway version.
• Retcon: In Spirits of Hell, Robotnik mentions that he still has some Badniks left to serve as backup, but in Whisper of Soul, Sally implies that either Robotnik has very few Badniks to call for aid or has ran out of Badniks.
  • And also Exeller also wrote this in his diary, that he did had one before the events of the game, but he overwrote it, by killing the person that said this to him.
• Remixed Levels: Subverted. In the Whisper Of Soul, will feature some levels from other routes that don't really get changed at all. The most common examples are Sally's Sewer levels, that get reused in the other Routes, and Cream's Rooftop level from her Solo.
• Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies: Subverted, if Sally is killed, she will ambush Round 1 with a rock element that she proceeds to use to throw a boulder at them, which kills everyone.

"Boulder flies, everyone dies."

• Repressed Memories: Amy represses her tragic memory of parents via medication.
• Revenge Before Reason: Crazy Amy route, makes Amy hell-bented on going after Eggman to murder him after it gets revealed that he killed her Family, despite being in a survival situation against Exeller, it suddenly becomes personal for her. And she will not stop or care about others standing in her way as she will kill them or threaten them to get out of her way, she will not bother with reasoning what so over.
• Replay Value: Both Rounds 1 and 2 (Spirits Of Hell and Whisper Of Soul) have a lot of Multiple Endings which makes the game really replayable.
• Redshirt Army: In the Whisper Of Soul's Best Ending: Sally will gather and order an army, that will be shown in the cinematic cutscene.
• "Ray of Hope" Ending: In the Spirits of Hell: If you ever get an duo ending or solo ending, it stil ends on a hopeful note, Eggman if he gets a solo one, decides to do a Heel–Face Turn, and instead decides that he will become it's own hero for the mobius, that will rescue them all and stop Exeller. Tails gets emotional in his Solo Ending, but despite all of that, decides to keep going. Only for it to get averted. (if at the Best Ending you decide to make a foolish mistake of trying to help Sonic, who explisively told you to run away! Knuckles gets his heart teared out, as Eggman shoots down Exeller, to buy Tails some time to escape with him, Knuckles then appears reprimands them for being such a bad and incompetent team that he will have to work with, and then will just get everyone killed) As then Exeller explains that there is no point trying to get the duos or solos, as he will just kill the stranglers off-screen.
• Run or Die: And is simple! In a lot of cases you will have to run, or get killed, this is not hard to figure out.
• Runaway Train: In Whisper Of Soul's Exclusive Trio route. Sally, Cream, and Tails. Decide to repair the train and via Train Escape get the hell out of there. But as they thought they are out of the clear, they hear sounds on top of the train....
  • Stuff Blowing Up: A fight then breaks out on top of the train, at the end of it, Exeller will pull out some kind of detonator in his hand, and then he will say that a "Big Boom" will soon follow. He presses it, and off it goes!
• Reset Button: Played all the way, in almost all Non-Best-Endings, it ends with the reset of the whole universe, rendering all efforts pointless, as it will begin again, in a loop.
• Reluctant Psycho: Exeller in reality. Doesn't like being treated as such, he reveals this in the Whisper Of Soul's Worst Ending.
• Reality Is Out to Lunch: Also counts as an Gravity Screw. Amy's Special Stage segments seem to lack gravity, Amy can also quick stop in case she picked up the speed and needs to halt her movement fast.
• Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: Exeller remembers what has happened in previous timeloops, but usually goes along with what's happening in a given loop (i.e. a victim suddenly escaping) just to prolong his fun and see what happens next. In Whisper of Soul, the worst ending shows this is only in effect for the person who resets the timeline; Exeller notes that if Alice does it, he won't remember their conversation during this ending. This is the only real reason why the main six even have a chance to stop the madness, since Alice intervenes in key moments and stops Exeller from learning about their critical moves.
• Satellite Character: Alice, she is there in case of timeline reset, to prevent Exeller from winning.
• Sequel Escalation: The sequel to Spirits Of Hell, has more content and more endings packed into it.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: If Tails tries to leave Green Hill early by backtracking to his plane when he says that he should "Go and warn the others." Exeller will spawn to take him out with no continues. Following with a message that is addresed to the player.
  THERE ARE NO EASTER EGGS!
• Static Screw: Common trope for both games.
• Shockwave Stomp: In the Best Ending's boss fight against Ultimate Execun, one of the Amy's patterns, is to strike down on the ground, as it sends down a shockwave behind it.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: Both Round 1 and Round 2: In Round 1 every non-Best Ending will have the surviving characters get killed off regardless. And Round 2, some endings bluntly or abruptly end, with no good payoff what so ever.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: If in the level "It's just an illusion" you will fall into the pit of spikes, Knuckles gets realistically impaled by them, The Whisper Of Soul averts it by not having it at all.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: Round 2, although is missing it's voice acting.
• Sudden Soundtrack Stop: In the Alternative Crazy Amy route: When Exeller mortally strikes Alice down, the music abruptly stops.
• Space-Filling Path: Cream's First Level in the Whisper Of Soul. Gets subverted in her Bingo Festival level. Which if you continue and ignore finding Cheese, Sonic will make Cream trigger an Speed-Up monitor trap, that gets her Impaled with Extreme Prejudice, by a wall of spikes, she also gets ripped apart in half.
• Stealth-Based Game: Both games trigger this trope, as everyone seem to more run, than fight against them, Tails has a stealth segment, Cream? Stealth segment, Amy? Stealth segment, Sally? QTE segment. (Doesn't really count if it's a QTE) Only Knuckles and Eggman seem to lack their stealth levels. This should get averted in the second or third parts of the game, where they start fighting back, or trying to.
• Schizophrenic Difficulty: Whisper Of Soul suffers from this issue, in a way, some of those levels (and bosses) will give off some Difficulty Spikes that were designed to get you killed at least once, but not while in a route that you are trying to beat currently....
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Exeller is seen doing this himself, in his past, and in the current Prophecy itself.
• Story to Gameplay Ratio: The game is filed with half of the gameplay, and more half of the cutscenes.
• Suicide Mission: All Best Endings are this, it is essentially a suicide if one of them fails.
• Suicide by Cop: In the Crazy Amy Route,If Tails says to Cream that Eggman's killing of Amy's parents were an accident, Cream will stop Amy from killing Eggman by shooting her in the torso, she will reasure Cream that she did the right thing, because she already became a monster, and all she did was to make her stop her, deep down she knew Eggman didn't do it, she just didn't want to accept it. She will say to Cream that she didn't kill her, she just set her free. Through those years, Cream's presence made her look like she was a Sister to her, like she had an Family, because that's all she wanted. With those words Cream tears up, and tells her that she will see her Parents soon... Amy then tells her for the last time, to live a good life for her. Afterwards she succumbs to wounds and dies. Confused Eggman wakes up soon later, asking what is going on. He is also surprised that Cream saved him from Hell Bented Amy. Cream doesn't want to explain what just happened, and she just begs him to come with her to the master emerald, and it ends like that.
• Someone Has to Die: Sometimes in some endings you have to keep curtain characters alive, in order for them to get killed off to put other characters into a route you want, meanwhile. In the Best Ending's case, that someone is Tails Doll. The friend that Cream made along the way, he does an Heroic Suicide, in order to avoid Cream getting killed in the Ultimate Execun's blast radius. He pushes her out of it, locks the blast door behind himself, to prevent the curse way of taking control over him, as he talks about previous timelines that happened to him and Cream. Then as the time comes he gets obliterated along with Execun, only His gem remains, which means he probably didn't die at all.
  • Mourning a Dead Robot: Cream will mourn him briefly.
• Single-Attempt Game: Goes Straight with the Spirits Of Hell, but gets Downplayed in it's Sequel Whisper Of Soul, as it introduces Free For All Level Select. Spirits Of Hell also had one, but you had beat it to a Best Ending and on Nightmare Difficulty. All you get is a code. Which unlocks access to all levels. Meanwhile in the Whisper Of Soul, the levels are locked at the start, and you can't simply switch to them before you encounter them first. But nothing can stop you from just playing the game as intended, from the start and to the finish.
• Sequel Hook: In the Round 1 at the end of Best Ending, he asks the player. "Ready for Round 2?" The same thing is implied in Round 2, but instead it just ends on a Cliffhanger, instead of confirming it out right.
  • Immediate Sequel: The Whisper Of Soul opens up immediately without explaination or a recap of what happened in the previous entry.
• Sole Survivor: Another common trope, you will lose characters even in a group, sometimes it will result only in one sole survivor remaining.
• Story Branching: In the Shadow the Hedgehog fashion, you have 8 main endings to discover! Which one is canon? A single one in the Round 1. But in the Round 2, you are forced to get every ending to get the golden one, again in the Shadow the Hedgehog fashion, expect in that game you could have just get half of the endings, and it will unlock the Golden Ending anyways.
• Save Scumming: In the Whisper Of Soul, you will relate to this trope a lot. Didn't like the result? Press F2 button and the game restarts to the main title. Same applies to the Spirits Of Hell. But in Whisper Of Soul you have Free For All Level Select, which pushes the trope much more. While in Spirits Of Hell, you have to beat the game on Nightmare to get an code to it.
• Schrödinger's Cast: Main Characters status keeps switching from dead or alive, mostly seen in the continue screens.
• Seers: Downplayed, despite other characters getting an curtain feeling that this happened before, they are stil scripted to get visions or react the same way in the future runs, their power of predicting future is limited, and doesn't work on command, so they are not that psychic in a way.
• Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!: Inverted. In the Cream and Amy Failed Route, during the Christmass Celebration video, Sonic and Knuckles are trying to cosplay as Santa Claus and the Snow Maiden, she will laugh and say that she is no longer a baby and you can't trick her that way anymore. Vanilla then asks her to Make a Wish, and Vanilla suggests that she don't say it out loud, or it won't happen, but she says it out loud anyways, thinking is just a child fantasy, she makes a wish for everyone to be together and happy! And then as the video stops she says that "It wasn't a child's fantasy after all..."
• Sadistic Choice: If at any point Amy or Cream die in their first part of Whisper of Soul, it will interupt the Round 1 sequence with Exeller arriving to tell them that they forgot about the girls, and then either one of them or two at the same time appear in their demonized versions to confront them. If two of them appear there will be no choice, and all of them get killed off. But if there is only one of them, a choice will appear, choosing between Tails, Knuckles, and Eggman. When one of them gets choosen the others die as the result. If that wasn't enough you also have to fight the Route Boss of your choice, funny enough, if Eggman gets chosen against Amy.exe, the boss battle gets skipped. (Skippable Boss.)
• Survivor Guilt:
  • In the Tails's Solo Ending of the Whisper of soul, he has flashback hallucinations, where it shows all previous interactions with other characters, in the Good-Times Montage fashion. With Sonic, Eggman, Amy, Cream, Sally, and Knuckles, which are dead in this route, and when Tails passes through the location, he gets overwhelmed with emotions and passes out, into a nightmarish green hill.
  • Similar event plays out in the Failed Duo Amy and Cream route, in which Cream pulls out her phone to view the Good-Times Montage Christmas celebration video, in which everyone takes part of. (Expect Eggman, he wasn't invited.)
• Staking the Loved One: Crazy Amy route: The one where Cream shoots Amy who has turned into a hell-bented monster.
• Self-Offense: If Amy goes through the Forester's Gate without breaking it, she will be spooked by an noise behind her, which distracted her from a dark figure that is walking behind her, then she tries to punch it without looking back, and it turns out that it was Sonic who she accidently tried land her haymaker with.
• Springy Spores: Cream's first level features these.
• Ship Tease: Provoked by Exeller in the DLC to Sonic, as he tries to make him decide between Amy and Sally. The blue blur clearly doesn't take kindly to his suggestions about preferring younger girls, though Exeller deliberately stops the player from finding out Sonic's answer to the question.
• Talking to Themself: Exeller is often seen discussing his next move or thoughts to himself. Justified, as the in-universe explanation is that Sonic (whose body has been taken over by Exeller) is also with him all this time in the DLC.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Knuckles, Eggman, Rexer, and Tails Doll in the Whisper Of Soul: (with many many other side characters that get featured in the story.)
  • Knuckles: Gets almost to no Character Development in the game. (He makes appearances in the Memory Fragments and in the celebration Christmas video. The only string Exeller seem to pull on in the Best Ending Final Battle is his Echidna clan, that would have been ashamed of what he is doing right now. Which kinda misses the point when he barely has anything related to them to appear in his routes.) He is just there to find out what happened to Sonic, and when he does, he just kind of tags along with Tails and Eggman to guard them to their destination, and when things go TERRIBLY WRONG. He's the only one who gets killed in his own solo route. Every ending with him ends with him and the others killed or much worse. He is just of a bad omen for those who tag along with him.
  • Eggman: Has the most smallest amount of endings available for him, guess how his Character Development is doing? (But he does in fact do an Heel–Face Turn in his Spirits Of Hell's Solo. But it's not canon in the Whisper Of Soul. As it continues on from the Best Ending the trio got.) In his Crazy Amy route: He is there for an condition of Amy going mad because he murdered her parents, and when it ends. He doesn't even learn anything from it, (As he was knocked out cold during the end.) and when he does, he is just glad that Cream managed to stop Amy from killing him, and he just walks off with Cream to the Master Emerald.
  • Rexer: A colleague of Exeller's, who is just there for him to be killed, and guide Sally out of Limp City with his clone that he made, and out of the mess Exeller put her in. He gets featured minorily in the Memory Fragments. And in some of the Game Author's videos, that hinted the possibility of him being a key part of the story, and then it doesn't.
  • Tails Doll: Had some chances of an Character Development along with Cream, but the kicker is that every time someone out of the main cast dies, he gets corrupted by the curse Execun transmited him with, and Cream is forced to either abandon him, or risk getting killed by him, as in some routes he Heroic Suicides in order for her to not get hurt. He does try to be friendly before that, protects her from Execun, and tries to search food for her when she says that she is hungry, in the Best Ending he is somewhat vindicated with his pep talk he had with Cream, and he is still forced into an Heroic Suicide in the Best Ending, as Curse almost fully corrupted him and he is at the end of his rope, he decides to get incenerated along with defeated Execun as Cream watches him, and his only crystal being the only thing that is left of him.
• These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: If you try to look up Exeller's or Alice's profile in Whisper Of Soul. You will get a message that says that a mortal like you, should not have access to that information. Even after beating the game, the profile is still the same.
  This information is not needed for mortals.
• Throwing the Fight: If during the Whisper Of Soul's Worst Ending: You intentionally throw away all of your lifes during the VS Alice fight, it will prompt a secret ending where Exeller gets killed by Alice via head decapitation, as she lampshades the trope by saying that if Exeller did this to himself on purpose.
• The Lost Woods: Whisper Of Soul: First part has forest levels, Cream has them as well, as they are both looking for Cream's missing pet inside the woods.
• Thing-O-Meter: In the Whisper Of Soul specifically: Amy will have an suspicion meter on top of the screen, when asking curtain questions to Sonic, Cream will have chase meter in the bottom of the screen, and how far she is from catching up. Best Ending, gets a time limit in the style of a meter placed on the left side of the screen, when Exeller starts to build his annihilation move, which when filled up, will grant everyone in the Freedom City to an mindfuck of extreme than Knuckles has ever experienced in his "You can't run" level, or just Earth-Shattering Kaboom for short.
• Tagalong Kid: Cream thinks she is this to her Team.
• Time Stands Still: Well...not for Exeller and Alice.
• The Load: Tails Doll becomes this if anyone out of the main cast dies, it will trigger his curse effect, rendering him to be incapacitated, and a load for Cream to drag around with if she decides to save him. Which can also result in her death.
• Too Dumb to Live: If Tails decides to follow Sonic, despite noticing that he has obviously killed everyone around and has blood on his gloves. He will lure him near the plane, and will execute him if he doesn't have a green ring.
• The Worf Effect: Despite Knuckles having destroyed Mecha Sonic in Sky Sanctuary, he gets unceremoniously offed by Metal Sonic to showcase that Metal Sonic is more dangerous and powerful than Mecha Sonic.
• They Died Because of You: In the Tails's Solo Route, Sonic's illusion will appear to say that he is dead because of him.
  • Shut Up, Hannibal!: The Attempt to break Tails down by saying this, falls flat on Tails's ears, as "Sonic would never say that!"
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: During Exeller's Final Boss Fight in the Best Ending, he will talk to the others that participate in the battle, bringing out their flaws, motivations, and even alternative ways they could have walked down the Villain road.
  • In the Failed Amy and Cream route: Exeller delivers a speech about how a child like her, would be a liability in the war, and that because of her involment, it costed her father's life. From those words Cream starts to cry, but then out of spite, she uses a fire ring's powers that turns her into a Fire Form Cream.
  • Averted in the alternative Crazy Amy Route: Exeller executes both Cream and Amy in a matter of seconds, to which Alice appears behind him, to inform that he "Sunk pretty low" and that he "Became one of those Bad Guys." These claims do not graze him however, as he himself claims that he likes being one. Then Alice says that "Killing innocent lives" is not the answer. Exeller responds back with how they are "Not saints" and that "This girl let her crazy friend to kill this man, who killed the parents of her friend..." Alice then however blames Exeller for "Making that girl crazy!" and that "None of this would've have happened!" Exeller doubles down that he didn't curse her at all, he just found a way to push the right buttons. So then he asks Alice, does she "Fight for the right guys?", Alice responds by "Not fighting for someone, but for Exeller and Herself." Exeller then sarcastically responds by saying that her speech was "Nice." but that she forgot one thing. That when she found out who he was, she didn't care about him at all. Then the speech backfires, into Alice getting attacked by Exeller, that ends with Alice's Impalement.
• Trauma Conga Line: Well let's see. Cream losts and loses her only pet Cheese, (which got impaled on a sign post) can lose all of her friends, loses her own house, (In the failed duo it gets revealed that it got destroyed) loses her robotic friend tails doll, loses her mother, (She is Dead All Along) loses her father in the war. (Because of herself) Punch punch punch after punch, yeah ouch.
  • Iron Woobie: But despite all of that. Cream can stil keep going and will never give up.
• The Last Dance: Averted, Knuckles tries to go out this way by fighting his demonized friends, but Exeller lifts him up, only to slam him down through the ground.
• Tired of Running: In the Spirits of Hell's Tails Solo route, Tails gets tired of running around, and in the end decides to just take the fight head on. Against Exeller.
• The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: In Tails and Cream duo run, a fully corrupted Tails Doll shoots down Execun (disguised as Sally) as he is about to fight them, since only he is allowed to kill the person who abandoned him, alongside those who are close to her.
• The Cameo:
  • Bunnie only show up on certain occasions and does not make an appearance in the true ending route.
  • Rotor the Walrus even more so, since he only has the fewest roles; only making an appearance in Tails and Cream, and Amy and Cream duo run, and Cream solo (alive), where he's manning the front gate of Freedom City. And in Knuckles solo and duo run with Amy (dead).
• Trapped in Another World: In Spirits Of Hell and Whisper Of Soul, some characters get trapped into other worlds for a brief moment, then they mostly escape out of the twisted worlds in the end.
• Timed Mission: Spirits Of Hell follows this trope well, like in any original Sonic game, it has a time limit of 10 minutes. If you reach it, the game would make you lose a life. You could also abuse this to die on the first level of the game to grind lifes, but it was then patched out so that every time you try it, the game would crash. Whisper Of Soul instead downplays on it, due to complains of players dying in the Bingo Festival before they could find the pieces to progress, it got removed in the full version, there is no HUD displaying time anymore, and also no score, since it never really played a big role in the game, but then there are stil levels that feature this trope in some other aspect. Cream's chase to get the purple butterfly. Which in reality is Alice. If you waste your time and won't follow it in time, you will fail it, and there will be no continues. Then there are the Best Ending levels, which will force characters to enable generators in time, or the red sky obliteration spell will crush upon them. It also gets symbolizied by the bar on the left side of the screen, if it gets filled up, you are dead. Vanilla's House segment, if you don't find a way to get out of there in time, your flashlight battery will run out of power, and you will be soon caught by IT.
• Trial-and-Error Gameplay:
  Tails Doll boss in Tails and Cream duo route: Im gonna break all your nerves, ankles, your keyboard and make you ragequit the game for months.
  • Boss-Arena Idiocy: In one of Tails and Sally bosses. You fight Eggman on the arena that conveniently has electric railing near it, as you will be using the same trick of. Throwing the boulder and electrifying him with the railing via use of your electric element, until he is down.
  • Turns Red: Each time you deal a curtain amount of damage to some bosses, will make them turn to phase 2 of the fight, which is more harder, and deadlier, Tails Doll boss fight is a prime example.
  • Some Bosses or Levels, require you to fail or die numerous times to get them right, some even counting as Nintendo Hard, they vary from each other, but Those One's Bosses. That take the cake are The Tails and Cream, Route Boss then Ultimate Execun in the Best Ending, the VS Metal Sonic, in the Best Ending. and finally VS Alice in the Worst ending is been noted that those specific bosses gave the most pain imaginable. Also in the oldest versions of Spirits Of Hell, if you died once to a Best Ending boss, the game suddenly decides to play the Permadeath trope, and will NOT give you another try, even if you stil have more lifes left. This is the only moment that happens through the whole game, thankfully is no longer the case, as it is patched.
    • That One Boss: Ultimate Execun one, forced someone to play for almost 6 HOURS STRAIGHT in the true Death Montage fashion. To understand why? See the rant video attached.
    These bitches are imposibile to dodge and hit at the same time, trust my fucking words.
    • VS Alice. Gives you 50 lifes for a reason.
    • Tails and Cream route, That One Boss: Imagine you are on a walking trendmill, and it's shooting down laser beams and projectiles in a tight small arena, sometimes if you stop and let it move you to the left edge of the screen, it will propeller you out, so don't stop moving or you are dead! The only way to damage him is to jump on him or drop dummy rings on top of his head, which deal little damage. Then comes the second phase, which most of the time, puts players off-guard as suddenly the screen goes black for a moment, and then he crashes on top of where you were last time, if he lands on Cream, is an INSTANT KILL. So avoid going to the right side of the screen at all costs. And then he doesn't give you time to deal damage to him, as he instantly shoots projectiles up, and they land on top of you, which if you got hit by the previous atttack, mostly means death to you.
    • VS Metal Sonic. That One Boss: Another trendmill boss. The moment you are out of your 5 seconds loading in animation, he will instantly teleport to you behind, Nothing Personal kid style. And slash at you, 3 times, from both sides, then he will do a charge in animation, with the Red Warning indicator flashing on the ground, you will need to jump, and then he appears for some free hits, where you hit him with your hammer, or even in a more advanced manner, hammer spin on him, to deal extra damage. He will then rise up without any warning, all electrified, and will throw laser balls at you, he can land from one laser ball at you, or even launch two at the same time. Those are pretty hard to dodge in a small arena. And of course there is a second phase.
• The Most Wanted: In the Whisper Of Soul. If Real Sally dies, a Fake Sally will take over, she will broadcast an annoucement that Sonic is wanted for murdering antoine, then in the Failed Amy and Cream Route, there will be his wanted posters around.
• Try Not to Die: Mostly said by Alice and Exeller, to the others that are stil alive, so that in the next time line they will get the best of it
• Tragic Robot: Tails Doll in the Best Ending route.
• This Cannot Be!: After beating Ultimate Execun, he yells out "No! This cannot be! I cannot be beaten by a kid!" but the irony on him as that he just was beaten by one.
• Tower Defense: Part of the level in the Best Ending route. Where you are forced to guard the generators by rapid spam of Sally's elements in both directions, you can't even see an warning indicator if they are coming or not, so blind spam is the only way.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Worst Endings, are called for that such reason.
• Talking Down the Suicidal: Averted. In the game over sequence of Best Ending route, when Amy loses against Metal Sonic, we then see Cream's corpse, implied that maybe due to an defeat, Metal Sonic killed her, but yet he is no where to be found nearby, then Sally finds Amy standing on the edge of a building, ready to jump off, she fails to persuade her that it wasn't her fault, and out of guilt she jumps.
• Take a Moment to Catch Your Death: In the Knuckles Solo route. As Knuckles gets away from Exeller, thinking he is safe. An character Junter from Nightmare Universe appears to take him out and turns him into an emerald. And then as he appeared he is gone.
• Too Clever by Half: Tails in his Solo Ending of Spirits Of Hell: Will decide to teleport back to his plane in the Green Hill, while he already has the means of fast transportation at his disposal already...Of course it didn't work, as he finds his plane destroyed in half, and Exeller waiting for him in advance.
• Taking You with Me: Averted, in Eggman and Cream route, in a moment of desperation, when Cream gets gunned down by Exeller, Eggman starts to threaten Exeller with the bombing of the Mobius with his own missiles, taking him, mobius, and himself to kingdom come, he nervously hovers his finger over the button as he says this. Exeller then Bluffs as they probably don't work at all. Then he swiftly kills him, as he himself doesn't dare to test that theory out.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Sally and Amy have an extremely tense and hostile relationship due to Sally's grudge against the latter. This is because Sally once developed an experimental machine that was meant to make anyone who used it younger (and she intended it to help her elderly citizens), but Amy irrevocably destroyed it by accidentally using it to age herself by two years when she hid in it (she originally wanted to make herself more appealing to the older Sonic). This does them absolutely no favors during their routes, and they only really bury the hatchet during the True Ending route.
• Through the Eyes of Madness:
  • In Knuckles and Amy's duo ending, they encounter Metal Sonic. To Knuckles, he is simply Metal Sonic (though he notes that he looks damaged), but to Amy, he is a monstrous robot with a bulky body and a Nightmare Face, causing Amy to run in a panic, leaving Knuckles to fight (and get beheaded by) the robot himself.
  • This happens again in the true ending route, where Amy encounters Metal Sonic, though unlike before, his body flickers, briefly revealing his (damaged) true self.
• Ten-Second Flashlight: Cream's Flashlight segments, got a really poor battery supply.
• Token Good Teammate: Alice is the one Highest that appears onscreen with no intent of erasing Mobius. She believes that dimensions that were neither erased or fully demonized might still have a chance, and wants Exeller to have a Heel–Face Turn. The second game shows that she's the one responsible for scattering the green and black Rings that save the protagonists in the first game, and she's the main reason that the main cast have any chance of surviving at all.
  • Take a look at the Jerkass Gods entry at Sally.exe Continued Nightmare: Eye of Three. It states that the Highests are cold to the worlds they create and will simply erase them if they get bored of them. They also don't care about the lives of mortals nor demons. Now take a look at Alice; she's unwilling to erase a world and is willing to help the mortals. She also resets the timeline when it looks like Exeller wins — an example is described above at Anti-Frustration Features. Alice being a Token Good Teammate really is taken up to eleven. She doesn't seem to care about demons, though; while it appears to be the case with Exeller, it's actually a subversion, since Exeller is actually a Highest himself. It's unknown if she ever met a demon, though.
  • Exeller himself downplays this: Zero-class Highests are stated to be inherently psychotic, but Exeller was mentally stable for a long time prior to Laura's death, and anyone could snap at a loved one's death.
• The Big Damn Kiss: In one of the Memory Fragments, Sonic gets Kissed by Amy. Who then shyfully runs away.
• Took a Level in Dumbass: Tails in the Spirits Of Hell: Tails is pictured as an smart guy in the Sonic Universe, (well mostly, don't count the adventure 2 moment.) who when gets the power from Master Emerald to teleport into any point of location on Mobius. Decides to completly waste it in his solo route to teleport back to his plane for some stupid reason.
• The Villain Knows Where You Live: The more victims Exeller kills, the more his tracking powers increase in range. Meaning that the characters can't just hide away from him until a given cycle blows over.
• The Virus: When Tails Doll saves Cream from the Execun, he gets hit in his eye, that ultimately made him infected with some kind of Virus, that seems to get stronger if one of the main characters die. It will corrupt Tails Doll and kill Cream if she decides to save him, but under some conditions, he does a Heroic Suicide in order to prevent himself from hurting Cream. In the Best Ending, he still does his Heroic Suicide. in other routes if you decide to abandon Tails Doll, he will come back to track Cream down to kill her, and in some routes, even becoming a Boss Battle.
  • In the Tails and Cream route: Tails gets hit in his eye, and after a rest, fully transforms into a Humanitarian, as he eats Cream down to her bones.
• A Tragedy of Impulsiveness: If Cream didn't try to become a hero and tried to save people during the war, her father would have not stepped in to save her from the exploding robot, leaving him with quite Not Enough to Bury on his funeral. And a possibile low self esteemed daughter in her mother's care.
• To Win Without Fighting: Exeller in reality can't be beaten, all that Round 1 did in the Spirits Of Hell were fighting clones of Exeller's, so others resort to other ways of beating him, by making it to the Master Emerald, which they think is the key to win him over.
• Truer to the Text: Since this is a fangame related to Sonic.exe: Nightmare Beginning, this is the case with Sonic and with Exeller's victims.
• Underused Game Mechanic: QTE System sequences, Cream's Flashlight segments, interacting with it's scenery and it's NPC's, Choice system, Eggman's busted jetpack boosts, (gets removed in Whisper Of Soul completely.) Exeller's Moveset. (Playable for that one scene.)
• The Unfought: Technically, you never truly fight Exeller. As he is an immortal being that is effectively godlike and he doesn't care for "fair" fights, every fight would end with him being the victor. He lets Cream power up and attempt to kill him out of boredom, only to instantly knock her out of the Emerald powerup when he gets bored again.
• Useless Useful Non-Combat Abilities: Sally can switch to her having NONE elements, which itself is useless, since it doesn't provide any abilities.
• Unreliable Illustrator: The Master Emerald is shown to have many green shards sticking out of his ground, but in some other routes, they are absent, or the Master Emerald gets moved a little more to the side, or just buried in the ground.
• Unexpected Shmup Level:
  • Spirits Of Hell: Eggman Solo Boss. Which will allow you to Spam Attack Exeller.
  • Whisper Of Soul: Amy Solo Boss. Almost the same thing as Eggman's.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change:
  • Spirits Of Hell: Tails will play a Stealth-Based Mission with Exeller, Knuckles needs to catch Red Rings to proceed through the barricade, and Eggman gets a Broken Jetpack, which the levels will revolt around with.
  • Whisper Of Soul: Amy will Press X To Doubt with Fake Sonic, and may even fly around in the Special Stage section. Cream will play a Racing Minigame with the Butterfly, Alice, and either will feature in a Stealth Level, or gather 6 talismans to unlock a door, to then a Flashlight level sequence in the house. Sally's mechanics would want you to juggle around her elements Boost, Fire, Electric, Wind, and Boulder. You can only switch between them in that order, and only with one button, no hot keys. Oh and right there are also QTE'S at the beginning of Amy's and Cream's levels.
• Use Their Own Weapon Against Them: In the Tails and Sally Duo route: Tails suggests Sally to lend her Family Heirloom device weapon, to get some more fixes and touches so that they could take on more things in the future, well in Reality he tricks her, as Tails uses her own weapon to kill her and then himself.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Eggman in the Knuckles and Eggman Duo route: Eggman will instantly abandon Knuckles the moment they teleport using the Master Emearald.
• Unusable Enemy Equipment: Zig-Zagged. In the Amy and Cream duo route: If you pick to play as Cream, she will walk around in the total darkness, in what implied to be a Hospital, there will be guards who have their firearms left on the ground, which Cream avoids picking up. But in the Crazy Amy route ending, the Eggman's gun will conveniently drop near her, as she will pick it up to make a painful choice.
• Unstable Powered Woman: Take a wild guess?
• Victorious Loser: Cream, as she loses everyone she met in the whole game, her house, her family, her pet, she lost everything, but yet she still can make it to the Master Emerald.
• V-Formation Team Shot:
  • In the Spirits Of Hell: Is shown in the first screen of the game.
  • In the Whisper Of Soul: Gets only shown in the trailer, and the Gamejolt page. Where the team is standing near the water that reflects their demonized copies.
• Videogame Dashing: Spindash, Cream's boost ability, and Sally's boost element. Oh and Eggman's busted jetpack.
• Villainous Breakdown: In a brief moment when Amy decides to disobey Exeller, when refusing to touch the goal markers and instead trying to escape the other way, Exeller blocks it off, and starts to act agressive, he even drops an B-bomb on Amy. Calling her a Bitch. This is the only swear that happens in the whole game. Which can also be fitted as Precision F-Strike.
  Exeller : "Grrrr, you obstinate little bitch! Don't like playing by the rules? Let's see what the odds become when I get you. "
• Victory Is Boring: Exeller views the first and second games' worst endings as this, feeling that his victims die too fast for it to be any fun and decides to reset the timeline in hopes they will put up more of a fight.
• Villain Shoes: In the Worst Ending of Whisper of soul. The player takes control of Exeller. But in the DLC, you are fully playable as him.
• Victory-Guided Amnesia: Winning in a selected route, gives you an Timeline Reset, that erases everyone's memories, with some down sights of some characters remembering their past timelines.
• Walking Spoiler: Alice.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Exeller wants to prolong the fun, killing the Main Cast right now would be Anti-Climatic.
• Weakened by the Light: Execun seemed weakened by it, when Cream flashes a light from her flashlight in his face during a Vanilla House section.
• Well-Trained, but Inexperienced: Sally seems to fit the description, she is shown to be the leader, and can well enough guide the entire city's millitia to fight against Exeller, she has only 2 boss fights in the whole game (not counting the Best Ending she stars in and the assault on the freedom city, which itself is an Tower Defense level, and those are just clones and not the real deal.) although she does manages to pull off a cheap shot at the Exebi in the Best Ending by killing it with the Thrown Column and only with the help of others. But without them? She is nothing! Remember those two bosses I mentioned? She is fighting them one at the time. In the situation where Demonized Cream and Amy caught her off-guard, she is making a run for it, meanwhile in the Cream Solo Route and Best Ending. She literally turns them against each other in the other, and defeats them all in the finale! (Best ending) Which brings a point that a literal 6 Year Old has more chances than her!
• Would Hurt a Child:
  • Played straight with Execun and Exebark, who mercilessly stalk Cream at multiple points in the game and not even caring about her feelings.
  • Subverted with Exeller, who, as revealed in a sub-route in Cream's run, was genuinely afraid to hurt her due to her kind and fair nature, but is forced to do so due to her role in a prophecy that's important to Round 2's story, so he attempted to end it quickly with his servants.
    • In addition, during any ending in the sequel where Tails is the only survivor of the first three, Exeller stops Execun and Exebark from preying on Exebi, seeing him as more useful to his cause while his servants think the opposite. He scolds them appropriately on the matter.
• Would You Like to Hear How They Died?: Execun disguised as Vanilla will talk to Cream, about her Vanilla's demise as how he brutally killed her, alongside with Cheese.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Rexer gets introduced into the Sally's first part of the game, he briefly interupts Exeller's plans in every single loop of getting to know Sally more before killing her, he then blames Exeller for killing the King, but he then parries it by saying that, "Is easy to judge when you don't know the facts" and then he charges at him Leeroy Jenkins style with the intention to kill Exeller, alone all by himself and with NO backup! He then gets a new hole in his chest and dies alone. But A for the Effort. (There is nothing he could have done with a guy who could literally stop time.) As he planned this outcome, he at least made an illusion to guide Sally out of Limp City that Exeller threw her in.
  • He Knows Too Much: He also probably kills him as he knows way too much.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: In some cases Exeller expresses the feeling of dying, and not opening his eyes again, no pain, nothing, just darkness, no more Groundhog day scenario.
• We Cannot Go On Without You: In the Best Ending routes, if you let anyone die, the rest will soon follow after them.
• Who Forgot The Lights?: Amy's Prison level, Cream's Dark Forest level, and so on, almost every level that has stealth segment.
• Win-Win Ending: Whisper Of Soul's Best Ending: As Exeller gets seperated from Sonic's body, and the Main Cast is still alive. Is cleary a win for both sides....For now.
• With Catlike Tread: Tails in his Hide And Seek act 2 level, can fly using his both Tails that also produce an sound cue for the Big Bad that can alert him with. Not only that, but there are also springs littered around on the level, that will alert the Big Bad if Tails uses them.
• Willing Suspension of Disbelief: If you can overlook some parts of the Spirits Of Hell and its grammar, then it's a pretty solid .exe game, that can even compete with Nightmare Universe.
• A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: Alice says this to Amy Rose, as a warning of who Sonic actully is.
• You Monster!: Sally calls Exeller this. In her Amy and Sally route.
• You Leave Him Alone!: During the Cream's second part of the game, if Tails Doll is still concious, they both will fly over the Volcano Valley, skipping it completely, as they land in some sort of dark building, inside Cream finds a chaos emerald, and both Execun and Exebark, that are standing near fallen Tails Doll while Execun is threating with his destruction, Cream walks up to them, and tells them to leave the robot alone, which Execun responds with "Or else what?" which then results in Cream's retaliation with the use of negative energy of a Chaos Emerald, which gives Tails Doll a big window to wake up and bail with Cream still in his arms, she seems to be unconscious after that negative attack, as Tails Doll dashes out of the neariest window.
• You Have No Chance to Survive: Some characters outright say this to them, or even the Big Bad himself will do.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: Vanilla appears to deliver this speech to Cream in the Best Ending, the words "You can do this." were enough for Cream to snap out of her trance state.
• You Didn't Ask: The word for word that Tails Doll responds to Eggman in the Best Ending route: When both Round 1 team and Round 2 team meet up, both of them act wary to each other, and try to prove that they are not demonized, then Tails Doll breaks the moment by stating that they are all living beings, when Eggman reprimands Tails Doll as to "Why you didn't said that earlier?" Tails doll responds with "You didn't ask."
• You Keep Telling Yourself That: Exeller's response when Rexer confronts him about his previous actions? "Is easy to judge when you don't know the facts." After that, Rexer unconvinced by his response, says that those will be "His final words." As he charges at him.
• You Can't Fight Fate: The whole game is this, no matter how hard you try to prevail, if someone dies, you are doomed to suffer or die in someway. (Because of The Prophecy not happening, you are essentially screwed.)

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